A listener wrote to us at the beginning of the year with a query, “I was just reading the news about the price of insulin going down to $35! Is that for everyone?” It turns out, there is a lot of good news about the so-called “poster child” for the high cost of prescription drugs. But to say it costs $35 now is an oversimplification – and diabetes activists don’t think this fight is over. Senior producer and self-proclaimed “insulin correspondent” Emily Pisacreta took a hard look at the recent d...
Feb 08, 2024•25 min•Season 11Ep. 2
Dealing with the American health care system as a patient means lots of tough moments – unexpected bills, meds not covered, insurance and hospitals making you go back and forth without a clear answer, endless hold times and phone trees… the list goes on. So listeners ask us all the time: How do I stay strong and fight for my rights without totally losing my s---? We’re bringing back one of our most useful episodes ever: How to keep your cool in a tough moment, according to a self defense expert....
Jan 18, 2024•25 min•Season 11Ep. 1
Real quick: Now's the best time to support this show! Thanks to a few super-star Arm and a Leg listener/donors, your donation is matched two for one right now. Here's the link to donate . Ok, now: We’ve got a mini-episode for you today, a four-minute coda to the epic story we brought you in December. It features a last tip for anyone who might want to ask a hospital about charity care — which, as we learned from these recent stories, is most of us. And it comes with my big thanks for being part ...
Dec 28, 2023•4 min•Season 10Ep. 9
Hey! The BEST time to support this show with a donation just got even better. Right now, any gift you make, up to $1,000, will be matched TWO for ONE, thanks to a few super-generous Arm and a Leg fans who’ve pooled their dough. . It’s a great deal, and it will set us up to kick maximum butt in 2024. Here’s the link, go for it ! And… are you ready for our most-ambitious story yet? We’ve been working on this investigation all year, with our partners at Scripps News and the Baltimore Banner . With ...
Dec 21, 2023•37 min•Season 10Ep. 8
Hey, it’s the BEST time to support this show with a donation . Thanks to NewsMatch, any gift you make, up to $1,000, will be doubled. It’s a great deal, and it will set us up to kick maximum butt in 2024. Here’s the link, go for it ! We’ve been working on this investigation all year, with our partners at Scripps News and the Baltimore Banner . For years, we’ve been hearing about hospitals suing patients over unpaid medical bills – sometimes even in bulk, by the hundreds or thousands at a time. M...
Dec 07, 2023•28 min•Season 10Ep. 7
Last fall, actor-writers Ellen Haun and Dru Johnston were hustling to get their health insurance sorted out for 2023. To qualify for insurance through the actor’s union, SAG-AFTRA, Ellen would have to book a little more work — doable, but not a sure bet. So they came up with a plan: crowdfund a bunch of money to make a short film, starring Ellen … called “Ellen Needs Insurance,” of course. It worked! And the movie, a 13-minute comedy , is terrific. Ellen and Dru sat down with us to go over how t...
Nov 16, 2023•19 min•Season 10Ep. 6
In 2019, Dr. Luke Messac was a medical resident who found himself spending his day off in a courthouse archive. He’d heard about hospitals suing their own patients over unpaid medical bills. He wanted to know if the hospitals he worked in were doing the same. They were. Trained as a historian, Messac then set out to trace the history of this phenomenon, and the story of medical debt in the U.S. His new book, Your Money or Your Life is the result of that research. Luke Messac sat down with us for...
Nov 02, 2023•26 min•Season 10Ep. 5
First: an update on our recent two-parter with the writer John Green, about the global, decades-long fight to make an important tuberculosis drug more widely available. Just two days after we posted part 2, the activists waging that battle scored a major victory. John Green was kvelling on YouTube , of course. We’ll get you up to speed. And for the meat of this episode, we’ve got a guest a lot of you have been asking for: Physician/comedian Will Flanary, AKA Dr. Glaucomflecken. His punchy videos...
Oct 19, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Season 10Ep. 4
This is part two of our globe-spanning story about drugs, patents, and YouTube megastar John Green. Quick recap: In our last episode, we learned how writer and YouTube star John Green kicked up a fight with Johnson & Johnson over a medicine called bedaquiline. And appeared to score a victory. Here, we dig into the backstory: How everything John Green and his fans won was built on activism going back 20 years, and spanning multiple continents. All of it illustrates how pharma companies work t...
Sep 28, 2023•26 min•Season 10Ep. 3
This episode is special. When we heard that widely-beloved writer John Green was rallying his online community around a fight over drug prices — and apparently making a difference — we were pumped. And this story took us in so many different directions: Literally around the world, and then straight back home. The drug in question is bedaquiline, made by Johnson & Johnson. It treats drug-resistant tuberculosis, and its price has been a huge obstacle to getting it to places it’s needed most — ...
Sep 07, 2023•23 min•Season 10Ep. 2
Hey there— our next story is gonna take a little more time to cook, but it is going to be SO worth it. It involves John Green , author of The Fault in Our Stars — and yes, we've got an interview with him — and a global fight against multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. ... which turns out to be directly related to fights over the prices of drugs like insulin and humira in this country. Meanwhile, let me recommend a story from ProPublica that's related to a story we did here a few months ago. You m...
Aug 17, 2023•4 min
For a year and a half now, the No Surprises Act has protected patients from some of the most outrageous out-of-network medical bills. But Congress left something pretty crucial out of the law — bills from ground ambulances. We look at just how wild ambulance bills can be, with a story about three siblings who took identical ambulance rides — from the same car wreck to the same hospital — and got completely different bills. (Thanks to Bram Sable-Smith who reported the story for the Bill of the Mo...
Jul 27, 2023•20 min•Season 10Ep. 1
If you’ve been told your insurance won’t cover your meds — or that you’re gonna have to pay an arm and a leg for them — you’ve met a PBM: a pharmacy benefits manager. And: Experts say they play a big role in jacking up drug prices overall. But how, exactly? We took a deep dive. This episode first went out in 2019. We’re bringing it back because PBMs are in the news these days: Congress is targeting them, in an effort to to be seen doing something about prescription drug prices. And PBMs’ sometim...
Jul 06, 2023•22 min•Season 9Ep. 9
A listener’s doctor wanted her credit card info up front — before her appointment. She wondered: Do I need to give it to them? We did too. After all, who wants the risk of being overcharged — and then having to fight for money back? Experts gave us their best advice, including a couple of tricks to try, and a legal protection you may be able to rely on. Meanwhile, Elisabeth Rosenthal, senior contributing editor at KFF Health News, filled us in on the rapid growth of medical debt as a financial p...
Jun 15, 2023•22 min•Season 9Ep. 8
When a New York doctor tweeted recently about “payday loans” for doctors from a branch of UnitedHealth Group — which operates the giant insurance company UnitedHealthcare — we were intrigued. Especially when we saw that the loan product — a “cash flow solution” for health care providers — was real. The doctor’s tweet essentially accused UHG’s insurance arm of causing cash flow problems for providers in the first place, by denying claims and delaying payments — which echoes complaints we’ve heard...
May 25, 2023•23 min•Season 9Ep. 7
For lots of people, trying to access mental health treatment — like a therapist or a psychiatrist —is nothing short of a horror story. You could even call it a ghost story. A “Ghost network” is what researchers and journalists call it when your insurance plan offers a list of “in-network” providers that turns out to be bogus. Attorney Abigail Burman has studied this haunted phenomenon , and she’s become a part-time volunteer ghostbuster for people in her life. She’s here to share her tactics wit...
May 03, 2023•25 min•Season 9Ep. 6
Before her surgery, a hospital told Lisa French she would end up owing them $1,337. After insurance paid them — more than they’d expected — the hospital billed her $229,000. And sued her for it. Her case went all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court. The questions before the court, and how they ruled, have potentially major implications for our legal rights when it comes to fighting unfair medical bills — and how some hospitals might be thinking about their next move. Here’s a transcript of the...
Apr 13, 2023•27 min•Season 9Ep. 5
What if we had a decent, publicly-funded health system — available to everybody, with or without insurance? We’ve got one, says Dr. Ricardo Nuila. It’s where he works. And it could be a model for the whole country. Yes, really. That’s the pitch he makes in his new book, The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine . It’s a love letter to Houston’s Ben Taub hospital, and an argument for bringing Ben Taub’s model — efficient, innovative, and cheap —to the rest of the country. And if ...
Mar 23, 2023•29 min•Season 9Ep. 4
The ER visit was quick and uneventful. The bill was $1,300. Our listener decided to push back. He didn't win, but he learned a lot — and so did we. We had help, from an expert we met by visiting a Renaissance Fair — which we did in this very fun early episode . Kaelyn Globig, head of advocacy for the Rescu Foundation , is a medical-bill wizard, and no one has taught us more. In this story, she teaches us how to find out what Medicare pays for a given procedure — here’s the guide she shared with ...
Mar 02, 2023•20 min•Season 9Ep. 3
“I sued a hospital in small claims court and lost — here’s what I learned.” That was the subject line for an email we got from listener Lauren Slemenda. She wrote: “I feel like I won” — and we knew we needed to talk with her. She wants to encourage more people to try taking providers to court over unfair bills. “If everybody that they screw stands up,” she says, “They can't afford to pay a lawyer to defend against all of those [cases].” It’s an interesting idea for sure — What if more people use...
Feb 09, 2023•26 min•Season 9Ep. 2
We’re kicking off the year with a throwback. We revisit a 2019 episode that opened up new possibilities for fighting back against outrageous medical bills — a theme we’ll spend a lot more time exploring this year A listener named Miriam got a bill from a medical testing lab she’s never heard of, for $35. Then, a follow-up bill said if she didn’t pay up right away, that price was going up — WAY up: to $1,287. Which raises the kind of question that comes up a LOT with medical billing: Can some ran...
Jan 19, 2023•21 min•Season 9Ep. 1
The Arm and a Leg editorial team gathered to talk about the moments from 2022 that we’ll never forget — including when work collided with real life. We’re so lucky we get to do this work, and we couldn’t do it without our community. From sending us your stories and questions, to supporting the show financially, our listeners and subscribers are what this show runs on. Thank you. If you want to help us take on 2023, now is a great time to contribute. This month, every dollar you donate is DOUBLED...
Dec 29, 2022•14 min•Season 8Ep. 8
When a car hit Susan and knocked out a bunch of teeth, her health insurance was supposed to pay for her oral surgery, and she knew it. So why has she had to chase them for 18 months and counting? Getting insurance to pay for anything dental is usually hard, but this had us asking ourselves… is it usually this hard? We connected Susan with law professor Jacqueline Fox — who, when she was practicing law, fought insurers on behalf of patients. And who says Susan has “done everything right.” We’ve s...
Dec 19, 2022•26 min•Season 8Ep. 7
A couple months ago, we started getting messages from listeners telling us: you gotta watch this video. It’s a thirty minute YouTube video from a creator named Brian David Gilbert, and it’s probably the best video about health insurance we’ve ever seen. Brian David Gilbert is best known for his highly-detailed, hilarious videos for Polygon, a media company about video games. But when he left that job to strike out on his own, he needed new health insurance. We talked with him about how that expe...
Dec 01, 2022•19 min•Season 8Ep. 6
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion has been banned in more than a dozen states. As you choose your insurance plan for next year, you might be wondering: How does that affect my insurance plan? We learned two big things. First: There’s no one answer (and few answers are settled yet). A lot depends on where you live, and where you work. But second: For lots of people, for a long time, insurance has rarely been a help in accessing abortion. Most people pay cash. And lots of pe...
Nov 17, 2022•26 min•Season 8Ep. 5
It’s open enrollment for 2023 health insurance for lots of folks — a time when you might find yourself asking: what good is health insurance anyway? One listener wrote to us about his son, a student with no income. Dad asks, If the son could get charity care (financial assistance) at his local hospital…. should he bother getting health insurance? The big picture question: If you’re broke, and can’t get insurance from work, what are your best options? The big picture answer: It totally depends! D...
Nov 03, 2022•27 min•Season 8Ep. 4
Hey there, You may have noticed, we've been keeping a slower pace for the last few months — publishing every three weeks instead of every two — since Dan recovered from COVID. And every-three-weeks is gonna stay our default for now. Putting out the show more often was wrecking Dan's health, and some important behind-the-scenes work just wasn't getting done. When we slowed down the podcast release schedule, we also suspended the First Aid Kit newsletter, which compiles our most-useful information...
Oct 20, 2022•5 min•Season 8Ep. 3
This year, the state of California put up $100 million to produce its own insulin, and sell it for cheap. How’s it going to work? (Is it going to work?) The price of insulin could be the starkest example of our out-of-control health care system: More than 7 million Americans need it to survive, and some die because they can’t afford it— medicine that’s been around for 100 years, medicine its discoverers didn’t want to patent. We look at how California’s plan came to be, and what might stand in t...
Sep 29, 2022•19 min•Season 8Ep. 2
Lots of seniors have to pay thousands of dollars for drugs—even tens of thousands—or do without life-saving medicine. That’s finally going to change. The new Inflation Reduction Act will set a $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket drug costs for seniors. (Yes, it’ll do a bunch of other stuff too.) It took a long time. Folks like researcher Stacie Dusetzina spent years building evidence about how Medicare prescription drug policy was failing people with cancer and other conditions. The pharmaceutical indus...
Sep 08, 2022•26 min•Season 8Ep. 1
It’s often possible to negotiate medical bills. It sounds hard — and it can be — but what if we got it down to a science? Mapped out all the moves ahead of time? Jared Walker and his team at the nonprofit Dollar For are running a big experiment to see if they can do just that. And we got to visit the lab. The folks at Dollar For caught our attention — and lots of other people’s—when they went super-viral on TikTok with a 60-second recipe for crushing medical debt by accessing charity care, finan...
Aug 18, 2022•24 min•Season 7Ep. 9
