Within academic health law, it has become commonplace to consider health law as involving four principal concerns: “quality, autonomy, access, and cost.” Ideally, we want high quality, supreme respect for autonomy, wide access, and low cost. A focus on the experience of patients being ill and seeking care is neither mandatory nor assumed, nor is it embedded in the study of health law as now generally conceived, which tends to focus on industry and public policy concerns. Shifting the focus to the patient in the study of health law opens up greater possibilities for the practice of health law to be more attentive and responsive to patient experiences.
To be clear, this is a project. It is not a description of what is, but a conversation about what could be. We are talking here about an orientation, perhaps as grand as a movement; for those preferring more modest aims, a directional push; for the even more cautious, merely an awareness of how laws affect patients. That, ultimately, is the impulse animating this project: to advance the notion that law that affects patients should better take into account what it means to be a patient. This Symposium was about exploring and developing that impulse, and critiquing and questioning it. And, as to be expected—and invited—there were detractors and caution-bearers.
This Essay identifies the areas in which participating scholars appeared to reach some consensus on this subject over the course of the Symposium, as well as issues about which there was disagreement, uncertainty, or hesitation, and questions for future debate. Also included with this Symposium report are separate short essays in which scholars participating in the Symposium share their individual insights on these and related topics.
