Teaching the Law of American Health Care
St. Louis University Law Journal, Vol. 61, 2017
University of Georgia School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2017-19
11 Pages Posted: 30 Jun 2017
Date Written: June 29, 2017
Abstract
In writing our casebook, The Law of American Health Care, we started from scratch, rethinking the topics to include and themes around which to organize them. Like many health law professors, we were schooled in and continued to propound the traditional themes of cost, quality, access, and choice. While those concerns certainly pervade many areas of health care law, our casebook's overarching themes emphasize different issues, namely: federalism, individual rights, fiduciary relationships, the modem administrative state, and market regulation. These new themes, we believe, better capture the range of issues and topics essential for the new generation of health lawyers. When we set out to write The Law of American Health Care, our objectives were threefold: (1) simplify; (2) emphasize primary sources; and (3) reorganize the classic state-based law approach to "Law and Medicine" to reflect the dominance of federal law in the post-Affordable Care Act (ACA) era. In this essay, we will discuss not only how we went about achieving these goals but also how the topical nature of health care law can be addressed through the use of themes, and how themes can facilitate learning on the fly when health care law changes, as it inevitably does.
Keywords: health care law, teaching, law school, legal education, Affordable Care Act
JEL Classification: I20, I21, I23, K23, K39
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation