People with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in Rio de Janeiro accessed basic rights of citizenship, including socioeconomic rights and even formal citizenship, through their use of the public health care system. Access to those rights, however, was unstable and this had life-and-death implications. I argue that patients could only fulfil their right to live after it had been jeopardised by the absence of basic socioeconomic rights that rendered life precarious. Thus, the right to live is not a prerequisite of other rights, but rather cannot be fulfilled without them. I discuss the politics of life in this context based on ethnographic fieldwork in an outpatient clinic for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and interviews with patients, health professionals, and activists, all conducted in 2009 and 2010 in Rio de Janeiro.