Abstract

The current concern with reforming and regulating managed care under the general rubric of “patients' rights” has eclipsed the more fundamental need to legislate the human rights of those without adequate access to any healthcare. To characterize the regulatory activity as a “rights” movement inflates its moral dimension. The concept of “rights” carries a serious and powerful moral force that is currently inappropriately applied to the parochial concerns of a segment of the population privileged to have health insurance coverage. By contrast, the language of “rights” refers to a high level of universality for the most rudimentary of human concerns. If there was a universal right to become a patient equal to other patients, a concept of patients' rights would have legitimacy. As it is, however, the central determinant of this “right” is how much the insurance policy costs and what is covered. To so diminish the meaning of “right” within the miasma of managed care is to lose sight of the real possibilities of applying a positive “right” to healthcare and, in the long run, is to diminish the ethics of healthcare.