A Palestinian doctor walking in the corridor of Al-Durra Hospital in Gaza City where power shortages severely hinder the capacity to care for patients. February 8, 2018. Picture by Momen Faiz/NurPhoto/Sipa USA. All rights reserved. It is a feature of our political culture that health has become a powerful denominator in how we calculate social justice. The NHS and its challenges make our news almost every day. Providing accessible high quality health services is central to how we see good governance and civic entitlement. It’s a sentiment reinforced by frequent polls showing it to be the number one priority and for most of us in the UK, we have come to regard it as an incontrovertible ‘human right’.
Not only in this country either. Generally we accept it as an ethical and desirable goal for others less fortunate within a narrative of ‘deserving’ and ‘entitlement’. This partly reflects a disquiet about our own political legacies. The unedifying scramble to abandon empire after the war was characterised by a pursuit of myopic vested interests rather than any serious attempt to improve the future ‘well being’ of the indigenous populations.
We now respond to this historical echo chiefly through a prism of charity and sympathy. Health, registers strongly with our wish to do something positive. Though, such good intentions and values are not unconditional. Instead they are invested with a notion of ‘deserving’ that has been re-articulated through an apolitical model of needs. At best this obfuscates relationships of inequality and power, encouraging us to empathise across cultural boundaries as an act of altruism free from political judgement. In this context, the idea of ‘deserving’ is replete with language that corresponds with recipient gratitude and symbolic powerlessness. It’s a perspective that relies on imagery consistent with a requirement to see our donor values replicated in the moral compass of those who we seek to help.
