| Health Care Law - Law 6842 (3
cr)
This course involves a survey of the legal regulation of the
quality of, access to, and financing of health care. Topics addressed
include antitrust, contracts, medical malpractice, patient rights,
licensure, and bio-ethical policy. Health law involves issues grounded
in contracts, torts, corporation, antitrust, financing, administrative
law and ethics
There are many reasons to take health law. First, no other field can
match the "magnitude, complexity, and universality of health care.
Health law introduces lawyers to the problems confronted by the other
great profession in the United States, medicine. Changes in medicine can
directly affect not just what humans can do, but how humans think about
being human (and, therefore, what rights and obligations humans should
have). As issues of public health and safety capture center stage in
American culture, the importance of prudent use of law to protect health
and safety becomes central. Finally, issues of social justice and
resource allocation are presented more starkly in the medical care
context than in any other context.
Other reasons could, of course, be added to this list. Health care
accounts for over twelve percent of the gross national product, and
costs continue to rise out of control. Legal jobs in health care exist
in a wide variety of settings, including local, state, and federal
regulatory agencies, private health care facilities, insurance
companies, and law firms to name just the major employers. And, perhaps
as important, there is no more intrinsically fascinating area of law
than law applied to the health care field. In fact, whole courses in law
schools have been taught around just one medical development, such as
organ transplantation, and one specialized medical problem such as human
experimentation. |
