**4. Rawls' theory of social justice**

John Rawls denotes equity as social justice and fairness [16]. He argues that the main pillar of social justice is grounded on the basic social structure and the social institutional distribution of fundamental rights and duties. Consequently, the political institution and economic and social arrangements decide the division of advantages from social cooperations. Also, social structure is the central pillar of social justice because it is composed of diverse social strata. People are born into the society with different opportunities and different expectations which are often decided by the political systems, as well as economic and social determinants in life. This implies that social institutions are structured in such a way that provides advantages to some groups of the society than others. According to Rawls [16], these social inequalities from the onset become pervasive and affect individual's chances in life. Rawls, therefore, proposes the application of social justice to cure or remedy unavoidable inequalities (inequities) in the society.

In the context of health financing, thus, buying health insurance for the people, social justice must regulate the fundamental elements of the economic, social, and health system so that the distribution of health care is fair. Social justice must be the cardinal principle and the applied strategy to distribute the fundamental health rights, to ensure that both economic and social opportunities prevail in various parts of the society. Rawls recommends social justice and economic redistributive justice [16].

Contextualizing health care financing by social justice and equity lens, it means providing health insurance coverage to all without jeopardizing their livelihood.

It also implies providing both the insured and the uninsured the best quality health care with maximum respect and dignity. Additionally, it suggests that health care providers and political systems should eschew greed, avarice, and corruption, and instead, be transparent and accountable to provide equitable universal health coverage to all, everywhere, at the right time, right quantities, and quality.

The ideals of social justice connote the adoption of the universal health coverage principles to provide financial risk protection for all residents irrespective of their ability to pay or not. No one should be impoverished because of catastrophic health care costs, usually, out-of-pocket. Consequently, social institutions mandated to purchase health insurance should do so based on equity and social justice. The guiding principle of universal health coverage should be equity, thus, reducing avoidable unfairness in health care financing coverage and access.
