Health Law: Cases, Materials and Problems

Thirty-five years ago, the first edition of this Health Law casebook quite literally defined the subject of Health Law in the United States. Today this book, cited by the United States Supreme Court and a host of other courts, remains the leading Health Law casebook in American law schools.

The new 9th edition provides up-to-date coverage of the field in all of its complexity, while retaining the substantially slimmed-down size of the prior edition. The book offers new cases, statutory materials, and classroom-tested problems, along with succinct and sharpened notes, comments, charts, and other teaching materials. It is fully up-to-date as of mid-2021, including the many issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. It will be supplemented by a regularly updated website and, if appropriate, printed supplements.

This new edition centres the broader goal of a more just and equitable health care system. It incorporates issues of equity and justice throughout the overarching organization that health law teachers and students found so helpful in the prior editions. In this new edition, Chapter One considers health law and policy as part of a larger framework that encompasses justice and equity movements, and it reimagines traditional concerns of cost, access, quality, and choice in this framework.

Chapters Two through Five address ways in which the law can contribute to the promotion of the quality of health care. In this edition, materials on the professional-patient relationship and medical malpractice have been carefully edited and combined into a single chapter.

The second part of the text in Chapters Six through Ten is substantially updated, and the chapters reordered for this new edition. It now begins with an expanded chapter on discrimination and unequal treatment in health care, followed by an updated chapter explaining the options available to those who want to reform the American health care system. The chapters then provide a full analysis of the consequences of ERISA, an updated chapter addressing the ACA and its subsequent legal and political challenges, and a chapter on the two largest government health care financing programs―Medicare and Medicaid.

The third part of the book in Chapters Eleven through Fifteen describes the role of the law in organizing the health care enterprise. This part includes updated materials on different ways in which the business of health care delivery can be organized and materials describing the legal relationships among different players in the health care enterprise. It includes separate chapters on professional relationships in health care, organizational structures and corporate law, tax, health care fraud and abuse, and the application of antitrust law to health care.

Finally, the fourth part of the text in Chapters Sixteen through Twenty-One updates coverage of bioethics materials with a focus on issues currently being litigated or legislated, including abortion and contraception, conscience clauses, the definition of death, and medically assisted dying. The casebook also includes a review of legal regulation of research involving human subjects, and it concludes with a chapter that addresses current developments in population health. The casebook is written to challenge teachers and students on all sides of these issues.

In this edition the torch has been passed to a new group of five authors who will be taking over future revisions of the casebook. These five new coauthors, all renowned for their teaching prowess as well as their academic work in Health Law, are Brietta Clark (LMU Loyola Law), Erin Fuse Brown (Georgia State), Robert Gatter (SLU), Elizabeth McCuskey (UMass) and Elizabeth Pendo (SLU).