Scope of the right to health in Colombia: constitutional revision, legal and jurisprudential

Abstract

The rights to the health were sanctify by the Political Constitution of 1991, as a social and cultural economic rights or as a second generation rights, that afterwards were recognized by the Constitutional Court as a fundamental right to law suits via three ways. First, you need to establish the connectivity and relationship with the rights to life, the rights to the personal integrity and to the rights of human dignity; second, recognizing the fundamental nature in contexts where the defendant is an individual with special protection (children, elder person, individuals with special needs or incapacitated, etc.); and third, the affirmation in general of the fundamental rights to health in respect to a basic scope, this is, as the services sanctified by the Constitution, the constitutionality block, the law and the mandatory health plans with the necessary amplifications to protect a dignify life. In the past twenty years, the rights to the health have had legal regulations, abundant and disperse regulatory in accordance to the changes of the economic model. However, it has been necessary the utilization of law suits, that during the past twenty years they have increased to more than three million cases due to the constant health services negotiations whether they are contemplated or not in the mandatory health plans. The intentions of this project are to review the rights to the health from three points of view, constitutional, legal and jurisprudential in the past twenty years.