Health law is a rapidly growing area of legal practice, reflecting a range of factors. Health care is a highly regulated industry, reflecting the billions of federal, state and private dollars spend on the delivery of health care services. Biotechnology, medicine, and the pharmaceutical industries are this region’s primary economic growth markets. The “graying” of America (and Pennsylvania in particular) requires new ways of dealing with the legal and medical problems of the elderly, new ethical problems, new expectations for health care and assisted living, and compliance with a host of federal, state and local laws, ordinances, and regulations. If you have specific questions you would like to ask, please contact Professor Barry Furrow, who is the Director of our Health Law Concentration. He would be pleased to share his ideas with you.

Sample courses follow:

Introduction to Health Law – This is a survey course that will introduce the four major legal and policy themes of health law: quality, access, cost control, and personhood. Part I will look at quality in health care and how to measure it and how to improve it. Physician licensing, malpractice litigation, and new government initiatives to lower the rate of error in medicine will be considered. Part II will examine how society can promote access to health care, what the goals of a health care system should be, and will introduce the student to federal programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Part III then looks at the economics of health care, considering how to control costs in a health care system. Finally, Part IV will look at the tensions faced by a patient in the health care system. Topics will include: patients’ rights to an informed consent to treatment, to be warned about risks, to have private medical secrets kept secret, to receive quality care, and to control the experience of one’s own death. The history and development of the American health care system will be considered, with attention to the development of the American hospital, physician power, and the growth of managed care.

Health Care Access and Payment – This course examines the rapidly-shifting means by which patients gain access to health care, and through which sponsors of health coverage organize and compensate health care providers. It deals with issues concerning the uninsured, those covered by Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs. It focuses on the legal structures through which quality, cost, and access are balanced. It examines a range of statutory and common law devices employed to balance the interests of providers, payers, and patients. It surveys tort claims against managed care plans, the “right” to health care, discrimination in health insurance, antitrust and fraud applications in health care finance and delivery, and the relationship between markets in health care delivery and finance.

Health Care Finance – The class will first consider basic economic material and concepts. It will then study different kinds of private insurance that have been the major sources of health care finance and the most recent innovations in the industry. The class will then examine the integration of providers, managed service organizations, and provider owned networks through which health care professionals have sought to retain their bargaining position vis a vis the underwriters of health care. Finally, the course will explore the effect of major federal payment programs (Medicare, Medicaid and CHAMPUS) and the impact of ERISA on managed care organizations and integrated delivery systems.

Bioethics – Advances in medical technology has forced society to confront increasingly complex decisions regarding life and death. Bioethics is the study of the philosophical and ethical underpinnings of the doctor - patient relationship, of government regulation of health care, and of protection of the individual as patient and human research subject. This course will explore the nexus between law, medicine and ethics, and will examine case law, statutes and other materials that attempt to grapple with these issues from a variety of perspectives. Topics may include the Human Genome Project and its implications, cloning, allocation of scarce medical resources; organ transplantation, stem cell research, and the right to die.

Other upper level courses may include Food and Drug Law; Health Care Antitrust; Health Care Transactions; Public Health Law; Regulating Health Care Fraud; Health Care Information: Regulatory and Common Law Protections of Patient Privacy; Hospital and Health Systems Representation; Medical Malpractice Litigation; Toxic Torts; and others to be developed by the faculty.