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Annual Review of Law and Social Science

Volume 13, 2017

The Judicialization of Health Care: A Global South Perspective

Abstract

This article charts the trajectory of the judicialization of health care from the perspective of Global South countries. It shows how the emergence of health rights litigation in the 1990s and early 2000s was bolstered by the global expansion of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and by major constitutional reforms that triggered a period of rights revolutions in South Africa and several Latin American countries. This article also tracks the litigation epidemic in countries like Colombia and Brazil, where the escalation of health rights lawsuits is threatening the financial stability of health systems and the fair allocation of scarce health resources. It concludes by discussing a fundamental challenge confronting the field, namely, how to look upstream for new approaches to the right to health to reinstate litigation and adjudication as mechanisms to promote more equitable health systems.

Keyword(s): health systems, pharmaceutical companies, right to health, structural reform litigation
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2017-10-13
2024-04-24
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