S. Stephen Rosenfeld | Attorney

Steve Rosenfeld committed himself full-time to the law of health care access in the early 1990's, after many years in public service. In 1996 he founded Health Law Advocates, the only public interest law firm in the country devoted exclusively to representing individuals and families whose lack of insurance coverage threatens severe consequences to health or life.  He has seen HLA grow to a firm of seven full-time lawyers, whom he now supports as volunteer legal director. HLA has helped more than 4,500 clients in the past eleven years.  In 2004, HLA won a landmark class action victory on behalf of 500,000 children enrolled in MassHealth.  The case, Health Care for All v. Romney, established that Massachusetts had violated the federal Medicaid law by its abysmal failure to address these children's oral health needs.  A five-year campaign to overhaul the MassHealth dental program is underway, under the terms of a court order in the case. 

On the occasion of HLA's 10th Anniversary celebration, in November 2005, Steve Rosenfeld announced the launch of HLA's Children's Mental Health Access Project.  Over the next ten years the Project will work with a broad set of collaborators to attack the lack of effective children's mental health services, combining pro bono representation, class action litigation, legislative reform, and legal assistance to innovative providers of effective mental health care. Currently, HLA is part of the steering committee campaigning for passage of the most far-reaching children's mental health legislation in Massachusetts history.  HLA coordinated the drafting of the legislation.

Mr. Rosenfeld's law firm, Rosenfeld & Rafik, P.C., has represented well over a thousand profoundly and chronically ill individuals since its creation in 1996.  The firm's typical client is someone with a strong work history, stricken with a disabling illness, denied long term disability benefits by a disability insurance carrier, and threatened as a result with both lifelong illness and impoverishment.  Rosenfeld & Rafik now represents more disabled individuals in challenging private insurance denials than any other firm in Massachusetts.  His partner, Mala Rafik, has become a national leader in long term disability insurance law and lectures regularly throughout the country.

Steve Rosenfeld has litigated in all the Massachusetts federal and state courts as well as the United States Supreme Court.  He began his legal career as the founding executive director of the Boston Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights in 1968, but gained his true grounding as a litigator serving as chief of the Government Bureau in the Massachusetts Department of the Attorney General from 1975-1979.  In that position, he and his colleagues negotiated on behalf of the state the judicial consent decrees that overhauled care for the mentally retarded in Massachusetts.  During those years, the Government Bureau argued more than a dozen cases in the United States Supreme Court.

Years later, he served in the executive branch as Governor's Legal Counsel, and then as chief secretary to the Governor. Among his projects as chief counsel, he was the Governor's point man in drafting and guiding passage of workers' compensation reform in 1985.  This law was a high water mark for injured workers, speeding compensation, improving benefits and advancing immediate access to health care. He also helped create the Governor's Statewide Anti-Crime Council, which brought together law enforcement and justice agencies, prosecutors and defense counsel, and molded an effective team effort to attack the problems and the causes of crime for eight years.

At various points in his career, Steve Rosenfeld has taught law -- at New York University Law School, Northeastern University School of Law, and Boston College Law School.  He graduated from Harvard Law School magna cum laude, after attending Brown University. He was awarded a fellowship from Harvard Law School to study at the London School of Economics.

Mr. Rosenfeld participates on the boards of several nonprofit organizations. For 10 years (1997-2007) he was a board member of Health Care for All, He is on the boards of Community Catalyst and Commonwealth Care Alliance, and he chairs the Urban Medical Group. For ten years (1994-2004) he chaired the Massachusetts Advocates for Children.  He has four children and three grandchildren. He is married to Margot Botsford, who after serving for 18 years as a judge on the Massachusetts Superior Court was appointed in 2007 to be an Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. He lives with his family in Jamaica Plain.