Healthcare Advocate

This course will provide the practical skills and core knowledge to prepare the student to advocate for those in need of health care.

This course is intended to be useful for all attorneys, in any area of specialty. The course will identify the common obstacles – both institutional and client specific – which form barriers to health care and explore options for overcoming those obstacles. Students will identify and analyze the structures and powers of insurance companies, hospitals and primary care facilities (a/k/a/ the doctor’s office). We will study statutory protections as well as pragmatic approaches when challenges arise to obtaining good medical care. The course will explore these issues in a variety of health care settings including: ambulance and transport services, emergency room care, hospital admission and discharge, care in the primary care physician’s office and care in the long term care facility. We will study advocacy issues around involuntary psychiatric admissions, how to enforce the right to decline care, and end of life issues. We will study implicit bias in health care. We will review the basic elements of medical malpractice claims.

We will study one of the important gatekeepers to health care – the Insurance Carrier. We will learn the process and procedure to challenge a denial of payment for health care. We will map the U.S. health insurance landscape including employer-based insurance, the individual insurance market, as well as review of Medicare and Medicaid. We will review relevant portions of ERISA the Patient Protection and Affordable Car Act (Obamacare) and will analyze the current state of proposed alternatives as they exist at the time of the course. We will study New York State legal structures that impact patient advocacy. We will consider the distribution of the quality and quantity of health care based on class, race, gender and other factors.

We will use a practiced based advocacy approach to the material. Theory, statute, and doctrine will help students address the real crises faced by real people in the United States.

In addition to Laura Gentile, the course will be taught by insurance and ACA expert Juliette Forstenzer Espinosa CUNY 2008 and Elain Sobol Berger, CUNY 2006 a physician and attorney, who served as Associate Medical Director and Senior Policy Advisor for the New York Workers Compensation Board.

Laura Gentile