Advancing the right to health: from exhortation to action - The WHO Council on the Economics of Health for all - Council Insight no. 5

This paper analyses ways in which the right to health supports health policies, programmes, and infrastructures for the delivery of health goods and services. Whenever possible, the paper also discusses the effect that the right to health has on health outcomes, and the macro-structural constraints that health systems face in their push for the right to health. The result is an analysis that goes far beyond the increasingly common exhortations to enshrine the right to health in legislation or constitutions. Indeed it proposes specific pathways that may produce positive results, namely comprehensive, universal and equitable health systems.