Though Houston boasts an esteemed medical center, the city is also home to a large low-income population with limited access to health care.

Brent Benoit, the new president of the Houston Bar Association, hopes to tackle the issue with the creation of a legal clinic for those whose legal problems complicate their getting health care.

Benoit recently talked to the Chronicle about the planned clinic, which will be run through the association’s Houston Volunteer Lawyers Program and offer assistance with everything from settling insurance disputes to securing proper legal documentation.

Edited excerpts follow.

Q: What prompted the creation of this clinic?

A: I think it was just an appreciation that we have individuals that are falling between two communities, medical and legal. We have individuals who aren’t able to get care occasionally because they have these issues. For example, they have Medicare, Medicaid or insurance issues. I have had conversations with in-house lawyers in the medical center hospitals who have expressed that this problem occurs at various hospitals. They have individuals who come with legal issues that are complicating their access to health care. Of course, hospitals are not situated to provide that kind of legal assistance. The clinic will be designed to try to help individuals who are impoverished, who are having some legal obstacle to accessing the health care system.

Q: What types of cases do you envision taking?

A: Those obstacles could be anything from insurance reimbursement or eligibility issues, anything from Medicare and Medicaid eligibility issues or other issues with those programs. It could be legal documentation problems. For example, somebody goes to the hospital and they have a procedure done, and there is some dispute about whether the procedure is covered or whether there is coverage for a specific aspect of their care, or they need to have it covered in order to be able to do it because they don’t have means to pay for the procedure absent that. Another thing is, for example, someone has a very serious health issue that requires a serious procedure and, in order to feel comfortable doing it, needs to have someone able to make decisions for them should they become incapacitated. They really need a physician’s directive. That normally requires the assistance of an attorney, and they may not have access or ability to pay an attorney to draft such a document. Or we may have someone who is terminally ill that does not have estate-planning documents. We would use this clinic to help them deal with that aspect of their illness by providing estate planning documents.

Q: When will the clinic open?

A: We are in the process of trying to figure that out. One of our challenges is we need to find the right space where we can have the clinic. Right now the Medical Center space is at a premium, so we are trying to work that out right now. We hope to finalize that in the near future. We wanted to be near or in the medical center or near a place where people access health care because we would like for them to be able to not have to go to wildly different places to get the assistance they need.

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