Should We Think of Legal Insurance as a Health Care Benefit

The recently published randomized research on the impact of having health insurance raises a fascinating question about whether we should start to think about we might think of legal insurance as a health benefit.

The research itself, very well summarized by Leon Neyfakh in the Boston Globe, comes to the surprising conclusion that health insurance does not improve general health levels, but that it very significantly improves mental health.  In other words, reducing uncertainty about access to health care improves mental health.  According to this description of the research, which randomly assigned people in Oregon to medicaid, “people with access to Medicaid were a whopping 30 percent less likely than their counterparts to screen positive for depression.”

As the article goes on:





So the obvious question is: would reducing the risk of these other forms of crises — or more accurately reducing the risks of overwhelming consequences from those crises — by providing legal insurance have a similar impact.

If there were a “civil Gideon” that would be equivalent to such insurance.  But because it is always a struggle for a poor person to get legal aid now, of course, our current system does not provide such a potential benefit for anyone.

There is, of course, a whole market for legal insurance (often called pre-paid plans) with some unions the UAW offering the benefit.

While a randomized study of the impact of legal insurance would be very expensive, there are surely ways to do some initial research into the extent to which fear of financial disaster triggered by legal problems might be contributing to depression.

That might provide a new way of looking at the benefits of, and argument for, legal insurance, particularly as part of employment and job-training packages.

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2 Responses to Should We Think of Legal Insurance as a Health Care Benefit

  1. Pingback: Startup Health Insurer Model for Legal Insurance | Richard Zorza's Access to Justice Blog

  2. Mary Ryan says:

    I’m thinking there are relatively simpler solutions that creating a star wars effect on “access to justice.” I don’t believe that we as American citizens can apply foreign policy to the United States Constitution which is the sacred document in written form which secures the rights of citizens. The effectiveness and/or enforcement of it has certainly been, and continues to be, a lively experiment. I believe that here in the United States, we already have what it is we need to gain access to justice. We have already implemented our governmental infrastructure consisting of the three branches of government. Congress is and has been empowered with the right to tax its citizens to provide the funding to create and maintain that infrastructure. We already fund a judiciary.
    Access to justice is an age old issue. Its preservation can only exist by the knowledge of its citizens. Creating a LARGER layer of legal services funded by the taxpayers as the normal mediator between a citizen and his/her right to justice or creating a “legal insurance” will only foster ignorance of the nation, disempower the citizens and make the division between rich and poor even greater.
    Although an individual who obtains health insurance may experience better “mental” health, it does not change the fact that health care should be just that and nothing more. To one’s ability to “access health care” contingent on “funding” has little or nothing to do with health care at all, but ensuring the health care “givers” a salary. Utopia mindset? Maybe. There is much to much focus on one’s access to justice as being contingent on funding. Congress has already funded the poor. The rich can do well. The ordinary so-called working middle class – have little to no relief. Ironically, it is the “middle class” who carry the load of the rest, including the rich and the poor.

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