HEALTH LAW & POLICY WORKSHOP
presents
Aeyal Gross
Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law
Health,Between a Right and a Commodity: A Comparative Analysis of the Israeli Experience
Thursday, February 7, 2008
12:30 – 2:00 p.m.
Classroom A (FLA) – Flavelle House
78 Queen’s Park
Since legislated in 1995, Israel's National Health Insurance Law, has undergone hundreds of amendments, and has been the subject of dozens if not hundreds of court cases. The gap between the declaration in the statute, that health insurance in Israel is founded upon the principles of "justice, equality and mutual assistance", and between reality of growing disparities in access to health care, attests to the growing processes of privatization within the public health system itself and to the move from progressive to out-of-pocket financing of the health care system. My talk will look at the legal questions concerning access to health care in Israel, and question the usefulness – or lack thereof – of rights analysis in this context. In this sense the talk is part of a bigger attempt to consider the promises but also the challenges of integrating human rights into the area of public health, especially in an era of globalization and privatization. Does human rights analysis bring back public values into health systems that are undergoing privatization, or does it inject the notion of private rights into public, collective systems. These questions certainly have resonance in Canada in the shadow of the Chaoulli decision which attests to the dangers of rights analysis in the context of health care. At the same time looking at the Israeli cases it seems that when a concept of a right to health is not adopted, health becomes more and more of a commodity, available to those who can pay for it. I will address current debates about supplementary and private health insurance in Israel, and consider how to bridge the gap between the promises of "justice, equality and mutual assistance" and the reality of Israel's three-tier health system. In a broader perspective I will look at the Israeli case in a comparative perspective, attempting to develop the discussion on the usefulness of rights and litigation in the context of access to health.
Aeyal M. Gross teaches in Tel Aviv University Law School since 1996. He received his LL.B. in 1990 from TAU (magna cum laude) and his S.J.D. in Harvard Law School in 1996. In 1998 he was awarded the Diploma in Human Rights from the Academy of European Law, European University Institute, Florence. In 1995 he was intern with the European Commission on Human Rights in Strasbourg. Dr. Gross was in 1999-2007 a member of the Board of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. He was a fellow with the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies in South Africa and a board member of the Concord Center for the Interplay between International Norms and Israeli Law and member of the Academic Committee of the Minerva Center for Human Rights in Tel-Aviv University. In 2003-2006 he taught in the summer term in Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. This year (2007-8) he is a visiting fellow with the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies at the University of London, and in 2008-9 he will be a Global Health and Human Rights fellow at Harvard Law School. His research interest include: International Law, Constitutional Law, Human and Civil Rights, Social and Economic Rights, Health Rights, Humanitarian Law, Law of Occupation, Sexuality and the Law, Queer Theory, Critical Approaches to Law. He wrote and published on these issues in Israel, Europe, North America and South Africa.
A light lunch will be served.
Jointly sponsored by the Faculty of Law and the Department of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto
For more workshop information, please go to our web site at http://www.law.utoronto.ca/healthlaw/index.htm or contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca
