Professor Anna Kirkland has published her third book, Health Care Civil Rights: How Discrimination Law Fails Patients, with the University of California Press. She is the Kim Lane Scheppele Collegiate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, with courtesy appointments in Law, Sociology, Political Science, and Health Management and Policy.
In this book, Kirkland investigates health care and legal settings to explain health care civil rights with a focus on gender-affirming care. She writes, "the application of civil rights law could be a powerful response to health inequalities in the US, but conservative challenges and the complex and fragmented nature of our health care system have limited the real-world success of this strategy." Kirkland's impressive scholarship explains how health care civil rights "work in theory and practice, and how to strengthen them."
Kirkland also achieved "an important ethical and dissemination goal for this research," publishing an open access e-book version in collaboration with UC Press and funded by an award from the University of Michigan, available here.
A large portion of this body of work dissects the implementation (or lack thereof) of Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act. Kirkland argues it "is a weak strategy for ensuring equal treatment and access to care," though she specifies, "there are more possibilities for how law might address discrimination in more complex ways." Nonetheless, she writes, "identity matters for living and dying in America today."
Read more about Prof. Kirkland's new book here.
Congratulations to Anna Kirkland!
