Universal Health Coverage: Should Healthcare be a right?

What is Healthcare?

Healthcare is the organized system of services, professionals and resources dedicated to maintaining or improving health through the prevention, diagnosis, treatment and cure of physical and mental illnesses,injuries and other impairment.At it's core, health care include;

• Prevention: Stopping illnes before it starts (vaccines, screenings, healthy, lifestyle advice).

• Diagnosis: Identifying diseases or condition

• Treatment: Managing or curing illnesses (medications,surgery, therapy).

• Rehabilitation: Helping people recover or adapt after illness or injury.

• Palliative care: Improving quality of life in people with serious illnesses.

What is right?

A right is something you are allowed to do,have or be or something that is correct or fair. 

The idea that healthcare should be a right sounds straightforward—until you ask what that actually obliges a society to do.

On one side, the case for universal health coverage as a right rests on a simple moral intuition: access to essential care shouldn’t depend on income, geography, or luck. In this view, healthcare is closer to education or clean water than to a consumer good. If untreated illness prevents people from working, learning, or participating in society, then denying care effectively denies equal opportunity. Many countries have built systems around this principle—some through tax-funded models, others through mandatory insurance—but the underlying belief is the same: basic health services should be guaranteed.

There’s also a pragmatic argument. When people delay care because of cost, conditions worsen and become more expensive to treat. Preventive services, early diagnosis, and primary care are not just humane—they’re often cheaper in the long run. From this perspective, universal coverage is less about idealism and more about efficiency and stability.

But calling healthcare a right raises hard questions. Rights typically imply enforceable guarantees. If everyone has a right to healthcare, does that include every treatment, regardless of cost? Who decides what’s “essential”? Resources—doctors, hospital beds, medications—are limited. Even the most well-funded systems ration care in some way, whether through waiting times, eligibility rules, or budget constraints. Critics argue that framing healthcare as a right can obscure these trade-offs and create expectations that no system can fully meet.

There’s also the issue of responsibility. Some argue that if individuals have a right to healthcare, what obligations do they have toward maintaining their own health? This line of thinking can become controversial, especially when it intersects with poverty, education, and social determinants of health—factors people don’t fully control.

In practice, most countries land somewhere in the middle. They recognize a right to basic or essential healthcare, while accepting limits on highly specialized or experimental treatments. The real debate, then, isn’t simply “right or not,” but how broad that right should be, and how it is delivered and funded.

In contexts like Nigeria and many other developing systems, the question becomes even more concrete: is it better to promise comprehensive rights that can’t yet be fulfilled, or to guarantee a narrower set of services that can be delivered reliably? A right that exists only on paper can undermine trust, but a modest, well-implemented system can save lives and build toward broader coverage over time.

So should healthcare be a right? A defensible answer is yes—but a defined and prioritized right, grounded in what a system can sustainably provide. The real challenge isn’t declaring the right; it’s designing a system that makes it meaningful.