Erin C. Fuse Brown, associate professor of law, received the 2017 Patricia T. Morgan Award for Outstanding Scholarship, which recognizes faculty members who have compiled a substantial and continuing record of outstanding research and scholarly activity within the previous two calendar years.
“Erin has become one of the leading voices on a number of health care issues that are critical to health policy and to people’s lives. She is a truly worthy recipient of the Morgan award,” said Leslie Wolf, director of the Center for Law, Health and Society and professor of law. “Erin’s ability to convey complex legal and policy issues to legal and non-legal audiences is simply extraordinary. I’ve been able to work closely with her on our NIH-funded grant on genetic research and privacy and have been able to benefit from her hard work, intellect and insightfulness.”
Fuse Brown’s scholarship focuses on examining and proposing solutions to the consumer harms exacted by medical bills and rising health care costs, as well as legal and policy options to address rising health care prices driven by health care industry consolidation.
“My scholarly efforts have been dedicated to shining a light upon the issue of rising health care costs that has massive implications for the national economy and personal financial well-being,” Fuse Brown said. “In so doing, I hope to not only engage the legal academic community but also move the policy needle to implement better legal protections for health care consumers.”
Between Jan. 1, 2015 and Dec. 31, 2016 Fuse Brown published three law review articles and three peer-reviewed articles related to her research agenda, including “Resurrecting Health Care Rate Regulation” in the Hastings Law Journal, “The Double-Edged Sword of Health Integration” in the Indiana Law Journal with co-author Jaime S. King, and “The Blind Spot in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s Cost-Control Policies” in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
In addition, she wrote a number of shorter works on related topics in national and international blogs, op-eds, and online publications. She also has several research projects in progress, including a three-year, $590,000 grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute to study legal protections for participants in genomic research in which she is a co-investigator with Wolf and researchers at Duke and Vanderbilt Universities.
The Morgan award consists of a summer research grant in the amount of $12,500, as well as a course release. Fuse Brown will continue research on the consumer impacts of medical bills, counteracting anticompetitive health care consolidation, and reducing legal barriers to state health reform efforts.
“I will also be watching what Congress does to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act in the coming months and evaluating how it affects ordinary individuals and the health care industry,” Fuse Brown said. “There is no shortage of work to be done in health law and policy research.”