Judicialization of health care in Colombia? Insights of the role of courts in the political dynamics of social provisioning

The judicialization of social demands is a phenomenon that increasingly is be-coming the pathway to access social goods such as health and education. With the incorporation of comprehensive bills of rights into states’ constitutions, judges and courts in both the global North and South have become key actors in the distribution of resources through the protection of human rights. Judicial intervention as a distributive mechanism of social goods and its potential to bring social integration and challenge commoditized forms of social provision-ing is a subject that still being studied today. This paper seeks to explore how the intervention of courts and judges are changing the political dynamics in so-cial policy articulation in light of the political nature of social policy and its power to influence not only access to social goods but also social inequality and citi-zenship. The case of judicial decision T-760 of 2008 issued by the Colombia Constitutional Court to reform Colombia’s health care system (Law No.100 of 1993) is used to reflect on the political importance of social policy choices and potential of judicial settings to address distributional conflicts.