Healthcare law Forum

[citrus2010]

Where do you see the future of the healthcare system and health law specifically?

Regardless of the reforms that lie ahead, I think health law is going to continue to grow.

My reasoning:
Elder Law is a subset of health law... it certainly isn't going away as the boomer generation gets more ripe each year.
Insurance law is also a subset... the insurance industry has enough flaws to employ thousands of lawyers.

My thoughts are not well organized, but I'd like to see what kind of opinions you all have of pursuing a career specifically focused on health law and perhaps a counsel position at a hospital.

[Cupidity]

the application of increased nano-tech is opening up a massive field of ip/patent health.

[citrus2010]

COME ON... no one else has an opinion? I thought I'd at least get some political responses.

[ec2xs]

COME ON... no one else has an opinion? I thought I'd at least get some political responses.

I've been told that the field is growing, but not from any lawyers.

[citrus2010]

Are lawyers not big players in the healthcare industry? I assumed there would be a lot involved with medical malpractice, etc. Real lawyers though, not ambulance chasers.

[MTal]

Real lawyers though, not ambulance chasers.

Wow, you're an idiot.

[citrus2010]

care to explain? or are you not capable of maturity?

[gregw8705]

Healthcare law is growing and I've heard that straight from the mouths of a medical antitrust attorney and a healthcare law generalist heading the Business Development department for a major hospital system.

Here at W&L we've actually only got one dual degree program and it's a JD/MHA with VCU's highly ranked medical department. I'm thinking about getting the MHA because I'd get in-state tuition at VCU and only add $9k to my debt and they have a 100% employment rate for their MHA program and avg. starting salary for JD/MHAs of 90k. If I'm not top 25% or so after this semester, I'm probably going into healthcare law through this program.

As for politics, with whatever reform is passed (I'm hoping none is passed, actually) there will be more laws which mean an increased demand for lawyers. These massive overhauls won't make things simpler, and the antitrust guy expects his industry to really pick up because the proposed reforms include controls on medical mergers and the like to "increase competition".

[citrus2010]

Healthcare law is growing and I've heard that straight from the mouths of a medical antitrust attorney and a healthcare law generalist heading the Business Development department for a major hospital system.

Here at W&L we've actually only got one dual degree program and it's a JD/MHA with VCU's highly ranked medical department. I'm thinking about getting the MHA because I'd get in-state tuition at VCU and only add $9k to my debt and they have a 100% employment rate for their MHA program and avg. starting salary for JD/MHAs of 90k. If I'm not top 25% or so after this semester, I'm probably going into healthcare law through this program.

As for politics, with whatever reform is passed (I'm hoping none is passed, actually) there will be more laws which mean an increased demand for lawyers. These massive overhauls won't make things simpler, and the antitrust guy expects his industry to really pick up because the proposed reforms include controls on medical mergers and the like to "increase competition".

+1

[engineer]

Where do you see the future of the healthcare system and health law specifically?

Regardless of the reforms that lie ahead, I think health law is going to continue to grow.

My reasoning:
Elder law is a subset of health law... it certainly isn't going away as the boomer generation gets more ripe each year.
Insurance law is also a subset... the insurance industry has enough flaws to employ thousands of lawyers.

My thoughts are not well organized, but I'd like to see what kind of opinions you all have of pursuing a career specifically focused on health law and perhaps a counsel position at a hospital.

I was actually very interested in healthcare law. My undergraduate work was in electrical and biomedical engineering, and I worked full-time throughout college as a paramedic. I don't see law doing much more with victim's rights/insurance crap...what I do see is the emergence of new technologies, specifically as they relate to the brain. Within the next 50 years, there will be a major increase in our knowledge of how the brain processes information, and I don't find it too hard to believe that science will eventually produce a synthetic neuron. Once networks of neurons are connected and a synthetic device has been created that can "think," holy shit. This field will explode.

As mentioned earlier, intellectual property will probably receive the most benefit from the emergence of new technologies. Malpractice law is still a big deal, so for the next 10 years, I think that people with an interest in health law would probably end up working in either litigating or defending malpractice suits (people, please choose malpractice defense....I can make a really strong argument for that later on) or more politically-charged fields, such as healthcare reform (public v. private insurance, etc.)

[Ipsa Dixit]

I worked at a public interest group last summer that advocated for health care consumers. If you are interested in public interest work, there is definitely a need for attorneys who can help the consumers. The laws are complex and the systems difficult to navigate. It's interesting stuff.

[citrus2010]

I'm interested in your malpractice DEFENSE comment. Also, with new technologies and radical changes in medicine, what would be the advantages of pursuing a health law concentration over IP. I've heard IP is over-saturated.

[Aeon]

I'm not sure whether malpractice litigation would qualify as health care law practice per se. My impression of the field leads me to believe that it has more to do with health care regulation, legal aspects of hospital management, things like that.

There will always be a need for IP lawyers (heck, the core of intellectual property protection is written into the Constitution). The field has long been considered a "hot" field of law, but the market for IP lawyers is tightening up now. I hear that patent law is still going strong, but for obvious reasons, it's a more difficult field to break into. Issues dealing with Internet governance and cyber-law represent a growing area of IP law, but there are few lawyers whose practice deals exclusively with them.

The tricky part about choosing a field of law is that a lot can change over the 3 years that you spend in law school. On the bright side, because there is no formal specialization in law as there is in medicine, much training is done on the job, so it's possible to spend your 2L and 3L years studying one field but ending up practicing in an entirely different one. This is also a good justification for perhaps focusing on more than one field over the course of law school (as it does help to take at least a few classes on the subject matter to which you might well devote the next several decades of your life).

[engineer]

I'm interested in your malpractice DEFENSE comment. Also, with new technologies and radical changes in medicine, what would be the advantages of pursuing a health law concentration over IP. I've heard IP is over-saturated.

Law as a whole is over-saturated, but IP law is one of the fields that problem isn't doing too badly. Granted, the USPTO did implement a hiring freeze not too long ago, but that really only applies to patent agents (I applied for a position straight out of college). Patent attorneys, in order to prosecute patents, need a law degree and an engineering degree--that combination is certainly a rarity in law students.