Jeremy Pilaar Joins Solomon Center as Executive Director
Jeremy Pilaar ’18 has joined the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School as its new Executive Director.
Pilaar brings significant expertise in health care law, administration, and policy to the role. Before coming to Yale, he served as lead deputy county counsel for the County of Santa Clara Health System, the second-largest public health care system in California, which counts an annual budget of nearly $5 billion and includes four hospitals and 15 clinics. Pilaar oversaw the team of attorneys that advises the system’s executive leaders on all aspects of hospital and clinic operations, including finance and reimbursement, regulatory compliance, care quality and safety, and patient privacy.
While at the County, he spearheaded several major hospital initiatives focused on underserved populations, including improvements to charity care programs that led to millions of dollars in medical debt relief for low-income patients, significant enhancements to language and disability access policies, and a first-in-the-nation program to expand Medicaid coverage to incarcerated people 90 days before their release.
This work built on his previous experience as a staff attorney for the Health Consumer Center at the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County.
“At a time when the federal government is upending health care policy and putting the country’s most vulnerable people at risk, I am thrilled to help push forward the Solomon Center’s groundbreaking research into how to improve the American health care system, as well as its extensive medical-legal partnership with Yale New Haven Health and the Yale School of Medicine, which provides civil legal assistance to many hundreds of low-income patients every year,” said Pilaar.
Earlier in his career, Pilaar served as an associate at plaintiff-side law firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Berstein, where he litigated health-related class actions; as the SFALP Fellow at Yale Law School and the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, where he managed the San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project, one of the country’s top local government law clinics, and fought to strengthen health care access and consumer protections; and as a research officer at the University of Oxford’s European Studies Centre, where he conducted comparative research on health care system reforms across Europe.
Pilaar has published widely at the intersection of law and public policy, including in the Harvard Law and Policy Review, the Yale Law and Policy Review, the NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy, and the International Journal of Public Administration.
“We couldn’t be more delighted to welcome Jeremy,” said Abbe R. Gluck ’00, Alfred M. Rankin Professor of Law and the Center’s faculty director. “He brings enormous expertise and leadership at one of the most critical junctures for health law and policy in modern times, and we feel so fortunate he chose to make the Solomon Center his professional home.”
The Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School is the first of its kind to focus on the intersection of law and the governance, practice, and business of health care. The Center brings together leading experts and practitioners from the public and private sectors to address cutting-edge questions of health law and policy, and to train the next generation of top health lawyers, industry leaders, policymakers, and academics.
