Health legislation. Health as a right. Human rights and health. Basic health legislation acts - Health act, Health insurance Act, Medical-treatment Facilities Act.
Health as a right, human rights and health:
- The WHO Constitution (1946) envisages “...the highest attainable standard of health as a fundamental right of every human being.”
- Understanding health as a human right creates a legal obligation on states to ensure access to timely, acceptable, and affordable health care of appropriate quality as well as to providing for the underlying determinants of health, such as safe and potable water, sanitation, food, housing, health-related information and education, and gender equality.
- A States’ obligation to support the right to health – including through the allocation of “maximum available resources” to progressively realize this goal - is reviewed through various international human rights mechanisms, such as the Universal Periodic Review, or the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. In many cases, the right to health has been adopted into domestic law or Constitutional law.
- A rights-based approach to health requires that health policy and programs must prioritize the needs of those furthest behind first towards greater equity, a principle that has been echoed in the recently adopted 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Universal Health Coverage. (1)
- The right to health must be enjoyed without discrimination on the grounds of race, age, ethnicity or any other status. Non-discrimination and equality requires states to take steps to redress any discriminatory law, practice or policy.
- Another feature of rights-based approaches is meaningful participation. Participation means ensuring that national stakeholders – including non-state actors such as non-governmental organizations – are meaningfully involved in all phases of programming: assessment, analysis, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation
Medical-Treatment Facilities Act:
Medical-treatment facilities, for the purposes of this Act, shall be organizationally separate structures on functional principle, in which doctors or dentists, individually or with the assistance of other medical and non-medical specialists.
Health and health insurance act:
Act for new system of national health care and private insurance.