Review of The Good Doctors by John Dittmer

In the light of current debates over health care, this book provides some sobering and relevant insight. Towards the end of his thorough and balanced history of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), John Dittmer provides a chapter entitled ‘Health Care Is a Human Right’. It has an epigraph from Aristotle:

If we believe that men have any personal rights at all as human beings, they have an absolute moral right to such measure of good health as society, and society alone, is able to give them. (228)

This chapter details the setting up in 1967 of a community health center, called the Tufts-Delta Health Center, in Bolivar County, Mississippi. It offered free clinical health services to the mainly black community and eventually ‘prescriptions for food’ to treat the malnutrition that was shockingly widespread. The staff ‘attacked the root causes of poor health and deprivation’ (233), organizing sanitation and providing education, with the involvement of the residents a crucial component. It served as a model for the development of other health centers.

Dittmer then leads into a discussion of the efforts by many in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Senator Edward Kennedy and the MCHR, to put forward plans for a national health program, noting that the ‘United States was the only industrial country without a national health program covering all of its citizens’ (236). Those efforts were thwarted by the American Medical Association (AMA), and pharmaceutical and insurance corporations, who all condemned the non-profit approach to medicine, too much government intervention in health care, and the view that health care was a right not a privilege. As there was no consensus as to what sort of plan should be implemented, the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s trip to China took attention away from the issue, and there was no consumer push for action, nothing was done. President Clinton tried it again in the 1990s, and was defeated. Now the administration of Barack Obama is feeling the same resistance.

Continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.