Cheltenham/Northampton, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2021, 224 pages, £ 80.00

‘What happens to the fundamentality of human rights when one of the right to health’s most crucial components becomes operationalized under a private logic, and what does that say about the alleged indivisibility and protection on an equal footing of all human rights?’ (p. xii). This fundamental question provides the impetus for Eduardo Arenas Catalán’s timely monograph The Human Right to Health: Solidarity in the Era of Healthcare Commercialization . Published in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, a medical state of emergency that has exposed the fragility of national health systems worldwide, this book aims at uncovering ‘healthcare commercialization’ as the central contemporary challenge to the equality of health care access as an essential aspect of the human right to health. In order to counter this ongoing commodification of health care under a neoliberal dogma, the author suggests moving beyond predominant interpretations of the human right to health that disregard, and thereby even reproduce, the issue. As an alternative perspective, Catalán proposes the application of the principle of solidarity in the context of the right to health, and social rights in general, allowing for a focus on the rights’ collective aspects and their implications for positive obligations pertaining to states.

Given the pervasive interplay between human rights law, public health policies and socio-economic developments within the core themes addressed by the author, it is highly appropriate that this monograph was published in the Elgar Studies in Health and the Law series. The book comprises 224 pages and is divided into six chapters that coherently illustrate the author’s proposed approach to the human right to health. As regards methodology, the book moves from a critical, yet descriptive assessment of the status quo of the human right to health’s interpretation, to a normative discussion of the topic, and ultimately proceeds to address practical implications in judicial and political realms.

In the Preface and Chapter 1, the author introduces the issue of ‘healthcare commercialization’ in a political context, assesses its problematic stance in the mainstream interpretative practice concerning the right to health, and highlights to what extent it may reinforce the inequality of health care access.