Policy Initiatives

Medical-Legal Partnership & Health Care Reform -- A Major Leap Forward!

Language for a MLP federal demonstration project is in the House healthcare reform bill -- read more here.

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At the heart of NCMLP’s mission to improve health and well-being for vulnerable individuals and families is the belief that MLPs can have a special, broader policy impact on access to basic needs and services that promote health for individuals and families. Domains outside the traditional purview of health, or even public health, yet necessary for health, include availability of disability programs and supports and access to core basic needs like housing, utilities and food.

Success in the policy impact domain depends on the unique, combined voice of medical and legal partners and the compelling clinical experiences of the medical partner making the health case for increased access to resources to meet basic needs for low-income families at the federal, state and local level. As well, for emerging and active medical-legal partnerships, the capacity to engage in meaningful systemic advocacy is a measure of program maturation; it is only the programs that have moved from the start-up phase into the active phase that can contemplate systemic advocacy efforts built on individual patient advocacy.

NCMLP has already authored Child Health Impact Assessments (CHIA) to evaluate the health impacts of public policies outside of the traditional health domain, such as utility access and housing subsidies for medically ill low-income people.  Since 2007, medical-legal partnerships around the country have found support and networking opportunities through the MLP Systemic Advocacy Working Group.  As the number of mature programs reaches a saturation point, the Systemic Advocacy Working Group will expand to become the MLP Policy Network.

The National Center’s guiding objective is the development and implementation of medical-legal partnerships capable of influencing policy decisions related to vulnerable populations and their access to basic needs. We seek to ensure that individual medical-legal partnerships are better equipped to adapt to their local political and social landscape, and better positioned to detect policy problems from the frontlines and subsequently innovate solutions.