HealthJustice

HealthJustice provides free, life-changing legal support to empower patients and improve health outcomes.

Securing Social Security benefits for a single mother who is raising a child with disabilities while battling cancer. Helping a family of immigrants obtain necessary repairs when their home is deemed unsafe. Securing emergency rental assistance for a mother of three, allowing her to pay back rent that accumulated early in the pandemic when she was laid off. For thousands of households, we provide critical support at the many intersections of health and the law.

It’s no secret: In the U.S. there are significant, pervasive disparities in health outcomes and access to healthcare resulting from race, income, and immigration status. This isn’t just a moral injustice—it’s a civil rights issue. HealthJustice provides free legal assistance to the most vulnerable patients in our communities—including those with disabilities and those who are threatened with eviction or wrongfully denied public benefits—to ensure they have access to care and the best possible outcomes. More than half of these clients identify as Latinx, and more than a quarter identify as Black. This work is more critical now than ever, as communities of color face overlapping public health, economic, and racial inequities.

The heart of HealthJustice is our longstanding collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). We are embedded within MGH community health centers in Chelsea, Charlestown, Everett, and Revere to improve the lives of low-income patients and families. Providers at these centers refer patients to an LCR attorney for direct, free legal assistance related to housing matters, disability benefits, and immigration/naturalization issues.

 Through close coordination between attorneys, doctors, case managers, and community partners, we tackle the complex intersections of race, immigration status, poverty, healthcare, and the law.

This is law for a healthier community.
This is a bridge to brighter futures.
This is LCR | HealthJustice.

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HealthJustice Focus Areas

We work with clients and their referring providers to identify and overcome legal issues that affect their health and well-being. This advocacy takes many forms, including:

• Disability benefits – We help clients access benefits by assisting with SSI/SSDI applications and representing them in legal proceedings.

• Immigration and naturalization – A patient’s immigration status can dramatically impact their access to care and coverage. With a special focus on elderly patients and people with disabilities, we help people navigate complex immigration legal issues.

• Housing issues – Health and housing go hand in hand. From negotiating with landlords to providing families with healthier—and often lead-free—accommodations to representing tenants in housing court, we address housing issues that impact health.
• Pandemic relief – We’ve seen firsthand how the most severe impacts of the pandemic have disproportionately fallen on low-income families and communities of color. In response, we have collaborated with local partners and health providers to coordinate mobile vaccination units and create multilingual vaccination clinics centered around public housing developments, churches, and community centers.

Click here to learn more about LCR | HealthJustice.

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