On the intersection of medical and legal need in rural Wisconsin

The Wisconsin Examiner reports today from Polk County, Wisconsin, population 44,205, in far northwestern Wisconsin.  There. a nonprofit law firm, ABC for Health, which is based in far away Madison, the state capital, helps people get healthcare access.  Here's an excerpt from the story: 

The effects on healthcare access when legal services aren‘t available is the topic of an article published this month by Michele Statz and Paula Termuhlen, professors at the University of Minnesota, Duluth Medical School. The research in the article is largely based on rural areas in Northern Minnesota and Northern Wisconsin.

The article, “Rural Legal Deserts Are a Critical Health Determinant” states that the most common type of legal problem for poor rural residents is healthcare access. What is not as obvious is that not having access to lawyers and legal services ultimately harms the health of people in these communities.

“It doesn’t take much to think about how if you don’t have housing security or you’re experiencing intimate partner violence and you don’t have access to legal representation, those physical and mental health needs are exacerbated,” Statz tells the Wisconsin Examiner.

But increasingly, there are fewer lawyers practicing in rural areas and even fewer that have the expertise and partnerships to navigate the health needs of the community. Often civil lawyers in these places focus on family or housing law, and ABC for Rural Health is in just one of the state’s 72 counties.

A quote from the article follows: 

Despite meaningful attention to social and structural determinants of health — many of which are intrinsically legal — and to physician–attorney collaboration, there has so far been little, if any, formal recognition of this unique rural disparity among public health researchers.  This is surprising, given that the same U.S. regions experiencing hospital closures and physician shortages, often characterized as rural health care deserts, are largely also classified as rural legal deserts.

And then the Examiner story continues: 

There’s a strong body of research on medical-legal partnerships, and a body of research on the justice gap in rural areas, Statz says. The problem, she says, is that the research too often focuses on just urban areas or just the criminal-legal system — when civil law needs in rural areas are desperately lacking.

Here's a direct quote from Statz who is, as the story notes, a Wisconsin native:

There’s a pretty strong literature on medical-legal partnerships; the problem is they focus almost exclusively on urban contexts. One thing that has been phenomenally frustrating to me is that overwhelmingly … access to healthcare or issues involving health insurance or medical benefits, [are] identified as the top legal needs among rural community members.