One of the hardest things about teaching Health Law is conveying the breadth of, and interactions among, stakeholders involved in the field. Health Law is about the very private interaction between a patient and a doctor,' but it is also the study of how these interactions are authorized, paid for, and monitored through a complex and layered world of government, nonprofit, and for-profit actors. Knowledge about the patient-doctor relationship alone will not prepare a law student to work effectively with any of the hundreds of stakeholders affected by health law, including medical professionals, insurance companies, hospitals, consumer groups, government agencies and, perhaps most important, patients. Students learn this best through a combination of classroom learning and experiential opportunities with clients and other health and public health stakeholders. Two clinical programs at the University of Wisconsin Law School provide these experiences to students interested in health law, the Center for Patient Partnerships ("CPP") and the Government and Legislative Clinic ("GLC"). Each clinic has as a core goal teaching law students about health law in a real-world setting of competing stakeholder interests. The clients at CPP are patients or their caregivers. The GLC, on the other hand, engages legislative and administrative clients. Together, the clinics embody the inherent tension of health care: the desire to meet the health-care needs of individuals, on one hand, versus the need to develop, regulate, and provide care with a systems- or population-level focus, on the other. This is also a tension the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("PPACA") attempts to manage. The law promises new levels of accountability and quality at the health systems level through provisions related to-among many other things-the creation of Accountable Care Organizations ("ACOs"), bundled payment initiatives, and the creation of the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board. The hope is that health systems, through better tracking of the care they deliver and the outcomes that result from that care, will become more efficient and effective at what they do. Simultaneously, the PPACA lauds a model of care that harkens back, in some respects, to the notion of a family doctor through the creation of "Patient-Centered Medical Homes." The "medical home" will track and be responsible for the care of its patients, and its patients will view their medical home as the hub of their health care. The PPACA also aspires for patients to become more engaged in their care through the availability of their own medical records, the publication of quality information about their provider systems and doctors, and enhanced consumer assistance for insurance selection and disputes. As a practical matter, the PPACA, creates a range of opportunities for students to engage these tensions on the ground, and to learn how, as lawyers, to help manage them. In the case of CPP, the PPACA provides new federal legal rights and protections-which students must first understand themselves in the context of state law and existing practice-and then convey in an accessible way to patients. In the case of GLC, PPACA presents important opportunities for students to assist public sector agencies involved in health care to learn how to anticipate, interpret, and respond to the changes PPACA will (likely) bring. In the process, this also teaches students an important lesson about the systemic role of lawyers: they are often the ground-level agents who implement change, strategically positioned to influence law in action. Knowledge of various stakeholder interests and the range of policy choices is critical for these attorneys, and students interfacing with these agencies witness these tensions play out in real time. Both the Center for Patient Partnerships and the Government and Legislative Clinic build on an approach to legal education at the University of Wisconsin that has been characterized as "law in action."2 The hallmark of this approach to teaching is that students learn not only legal rules, but also why those rules evolved to address social concerns, and how those rules operate in the real world. More than this, the clinics attempt to continue one of the longest and deepest traditions surrounding the University of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Idea, a principle that the University should improve people's lives in the state beyond the classroom and that citizens of the state have rich wisdom to share with students.3 Students in both clinics benefit immensely from the experiences of the patients and lawyers they serve. The clinical models we describe below are novel in certain important respects, advancing our understanding of what legal clinics can and should do, and the role they can (and should) play in the law school. CPP is one of a handful of truly interdisciplinary clinics, engaging the services of (and creating opportunities for) not merely law students but also medical, pharmacy, public affairs, public health, and even non-traditional students. "Interdisciplinarity" is an increasingly important part of the missions of many law schools,4 and CPP shows how this can be accomplished in clinics. GLC shares other innovative aspects with CPP: both clinics break fundamentally from the litigation-centered, adversarial model that has formed the important core of clinical legal education for many years; they have also attracted many joint degree students who want to apply their legal training in interdisciplinary settings.s Legal academics increasingly recognize that legal education can and should play an important part in the legislative and regulatory process. GLC brings that alive for students. The following describes each of our clinics in greater detail.
