Health-related deservingness

Abstract

Whose health deserves our attention, investment, or care? Answers to this everyday question of health-related deservingness – the question of ‘who deserves what, and why’ in the health domain – play a pivotal, if implicit, role in debates about society’s obligations to migrants and members of other vulnerable groups. Different stakeholders – legislators and policymakers, clinicians and healthcare institutions, the media and ordinary citizens – reckon migrants’ deservingness in different ways, and these competing moral stances have concrete effects in the domains of law, policy, public health, and clinical care. This chapter presents a framework for analysing debates about health-related deservingness, then applies it to recent debates in each of three migration settings: North America, Europe and the Middle East. The chapter concludes with a call for broad-ranging, interdisciplinary inquiry into how health-related deservingness is reckoned and the impact of different stakeholder assessments not only on migrants, but also on the communities in which they live.

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