Health care often accounts for one of the largest areas of spending for both governments and individuals all over the world, and as such it is surrounded by controversy. Though there are many topics involved in health care politics, most can be categorized as either philosophical or economic. Philosophical debates center around questions about individual rights and government authority while economic topics include how to maximize the quality of health care and minimize costs.

Right to Health Care
One question is whether every person has a fundamental right to have health care provided to them by their government.

 
Those who feel that health care is a right believe that societies which are able to provide health care have a duty to do so equally for all of their citizens. The United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights enumerates medical care as a right of all people.The opposing school of thought is that health care can become an entitlement if government specify it as a right of citizenship, but that it is not a fundamental right of all people. Furthermore, that it violates fundamental individual rights because it is a non-essential wealth redistribution.

"Individual rights" are the rights of individuals by virtue of their humanness, i.e. their nature as sentient beings. Individual rights provide principles to delimit the interaction of individuals in society with respect to personal interactions and the distribution of goods and services. Individual rights are sometimes held to be distinct from human rights, because the latter class is often considered to include human goods and benefits (positive rights) rather than rights proper (negative rights.)

Individual rights are an individual's moral claim to freedom of action. Such rights may be respected or recognized by others for reasons of reciprocity, contract, pragmatism, or as a moral imperative.
























 
 

Some individual rights may be forfeited if an individual does not exercise reciprocal respect and restraint. Individual rights are distinct from civil rights civil rights are rights granted by government and individual rights are assumed prior to government. Individual rights are often codified into law so that they may be protected by impartial third parties such as the government. Governments that respect individual rights often provide for systemic controls that protect individual rights such as a system of "due process" in criminal justice. Police states are generally considered to be oppressive because they do not respect individual rights. With respect to individual rights the role of the government is as a third party protecting, identifying and enforcing the rights of the individual while attempting to assure just remedies for transgressions.

Contents
1 Social Control and Individual Rights
2 Role of Government
3 What Rights
4 External links

Social Control and Individual Rights
In Western discourse, individual rights are commonly assumed to be inversely related to social control. By contrast, much of the recent political discourse on individual rights in the People's Republic of China, particularly with respect to due process rights and rule of law, has focused on how protection of individual rights actually makes social control by the government more effective. For example, it has been argued that the people are less likely to violate the law if they believe that the legal system is likely to punish them if they actually violated the law and not punish them if they did not violate the law. By contrast, if the legal system is arbitrary then an individual has no incentive to actually follow the law.

People who argue that individual rights are more important than social control are called "individual rights advocates". Advocates tend to argue for increased civil rights. This is traditionally associated with liberalism.

  
 
 
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