Urban Institute-Georgetown Law Project on Health Equity and the Law
Efforts to reduce widespread disparities in health and medical care face unprecedented legal challenges.
Recent court rulings, executive orders, and regulatory developments threaten the progress that’s been achieved. Yet possibilities for advancing health equity abound at all levels of government.
To this end, the Urban Institute and Georgetown Law have launched an initiative to develop strategies for reducing racial and ethnic disparities in diagnosis and treatment, empowering medical institutions to address social determinants of health, and incorporating health into economic and environmental policy.
Research Directions
We aim to provide policy-makers, lawyers and judges, health-system leaders, clinicians, and community representatives with data and analysis they’ll need to take the initiative. Current research foci include:
- Rewards to medical care providers for improving marginalized patients’ quality of care and addressing health-harming life circumstances
- Approaches to increasing clinical-caregiver diversity
- Inclusion of health concerns in policy formulation in the realms of immigrant justice, urban planning, and juvenile justice in the United States
- The phenomenon of legally unnecessary “over-compliance,” out of fear, with calls to step back from commitments to health equity and inclusion