Who Has the Right to Health in Iran?

From Monarchy to Theocracy, Iranians Have Been Denied Equal Access to the Country’s Medical Resources. A Healthy Iran Must Begin with Healthcare as a Right, Not a Privilege.

Iran is not a country lacking in medical talent. Iranian physicians, nurses, pharmacists, dentists, psychologists, and researchers today work in hospitals, universities, and scientific institutions across the world. Yet inside Iran, access to quality healthcare remains shaped by the cost of treatment, inadequate insurance coverage, problems in access to medicines, and geographic inequality.

This contradiction raises a fundamental question: How can a country with such substantial human and material resources fail to make healthcare a secure and equal right for all its citizens?

Health and the Problem of Power

Healthcare in Iran cannot be separated from the broader question of governance.

Under the Pahlavi monarchy, Iran experienced an expansion of modern medicine, medical education, and healthcare infrastructure. Yet development did not produce equal access, and substantial sections of the population, particularly in rural and underserved areas, remained inadequately served.

After the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic expanded parts of Iran’s primary healthcare network, but healthcare has not been insulated from economic crisis, inequality, lack of transparency, and political repression.

The consequences reach beyond budgets and hospitals. Medical professionals themselves have faced repression. During recent protests, physicians and healthcare workers have been arrested in connection with providing care to injured protesters, while cases involving violence against and deaths of medical professionals have also been reported.

At the same time, the migration of Iranian doctors and other healthcare professionals has become a serious concern. Iran educates highly capable medical professionals, yet economic, professional, social, and political pressures can push some of this human capital to leave the country.

The tragedy is striking: Iranian medical expertise serves patients across the world while many people inside Iran face barriers to accessing the knowledge, medicines, and care they need.

The Problem Is Not Only Treatment

A functioning health system cannot simply wait until people become seriously ill.

Prevention, family medicine, and primary care must stand at its center. Hypertension screening, diabetes detection, evidence-based cancer screening, vaccination, mental healthcare, nutrition, and the management of cardiovascular risk can prevent illness from becoming disability or premature death.

Insurance must also mean more than possessing an insurance card. Effective coverage should protect patients from medical costs severe enough to threaten the economic stability of a family.

Healthcare also requires transparency. Medicine procurement and distribution, allocation of public resources, quality of care, and management decisions must be open to independent evaluation. Corruption, political privilege, and opaque decision-making in healthcare are not merely administrative problems. Their consequences can ultimately reach the patient.

A Vision for a Healthy Iran

A Healthy Iran should begin with a simple principle: access to healthcare is a right of citizenship, not a privilege.

A future health system should guarantee meaningful access to primary care, essential medicines, effective insurance coverage, mental healthcare, preventive services, and appropriate care for children, older people, and patients living with chronic diseases.

This vision must also rest on fundamental rights, equality, and freedom from discrimination.

Nurses and other healthcare professionals should have professional rights, safe working conditions, and the freedom to perform their duties according to medical ethics. No physician or nurse should face imprisonment or intimidation for treating an injured person, defending a patient, or expressing a professional opinion.

No citizen should be denied essential healthcare because of poverty, gender, belief, ethnicity, geography, social status, or political affiliation.

Public health resources should be allocated according to the health needs of the population, not according to the interests of those who hold political or economic power.

Iran must also create conditions in which its medical professionals want to remain in the country and in which Iranian specialists living throughout the world can freely contribute their knowledge and experience to rebuilding the nation’s health system.

Health Is a Right

Rebuilding Iran will mean more than rebuilding its economy, infrastructure, and political institutions. Trust in the health system must also be rebuilt.

A free society cannot accept a system in which access to a physician, medicine, insurance, or essential treatment depends upon wealth, connections, geography, or political privilege.

Health is not a favor bestowed upon the people by a shah, a cleric, or any other political authority. It is a fundamental human right.

A free Iran must also be a healthy Iran.