The ABA Health Law Section Leadership Meeting is just around the corner on July 22 - 23, 2022 in Salt Lake City. This will be the Section's first in-person leadership meeting since 2019.
The Section’s Leadership meeting is a great opportunity for our new and continuing leaders to get together and learn new leadership roles and plan the year ahead for their particular leadership position. The opportunity for our Section’s leadership to network and get together in person is one of the significant values of being a member of the ABA Health Law Section. As Section leaders plan future Section events and initiatives, the challenges will continue, increase, and evolve as we work through hopefully the back end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
One of the Section’s main challenges is to rethink the Section’s in-person and distance learning programs, publications, the platforms used to make programs and publications available, the health law topics addressed by the Section in educational content, and new collaboration initiatives with other ABA Sections and healthcare organizations to bring value to our Section members and the healthcare industry.
There is clearly no shortage of issues and critical events that impact our Section’s members and their healthcare industry clients. Just in this past week, the United State Supreme Court released several significant rulings from the Court’s spring term, which included a ruling overturning the 50-year precedent of abortion rights in Roe v. Wade, a ruling declaring unconstitutional a New York gun safety state law that limited carrying concealed handguns, and a ruling upholding the HHS adjustments to the calculation of Medicare payments to Disproportionate Share Hospitals.
Our challenge here as the ABA Health Law Section is to find ways to educate and support our Section members on topics such as these, and to be a resource for our members and the healthcare industry. We are fortunate to have so many committed resilient Section leaders who volunteer their time to our programs and initiatives.
I’d like to say a special thank you to Martha-Marie Kleinhans, who is a Director with the ABA Business and Programs area, for all of the time, help, and guidance that she gave the Health Law Section the past couple of years on the Section’s programs, including the Managed Care Institute and the EMI Conference this past April in Miami. Martha-Marie recently had to stop working at the ABA because of issues related to metastatic (stage 4) breast cancer that Martha-Marie was diagnosed with 19 months ago. Martha-Maria is a special person that we were lucky to have a part of our Section family.
I look forward to seeing everyone in Salt Lake City! Safe travels!