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A few weeks ago, a listener sent us a note with a link to a news article about a new resolution that had recently been adopted by the American Medical Association – the largest group representing doctors in the US. 

The resolution said: hospitals need to do more to guarantee charity care to patients who qualify. Legislators and regulators should make them. 

Our listener was the author of that resolution, and he told us he first learned about charity care through this podcast. 

His name is Joey Ballard and he’s an internal medicine resident at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC).

We talked with him about his early organizing as a medical student, bringing the resolution to the AMA, and the optimism he feels bringing the fight for charity care to the hospital he works at now.

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

And again... we’d love for you to support this show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We’re starting a new investigation and need your help. We’re looking into something we’ve talked about a lot on this show: hospital financial assistance – also known as “charity care” — which most hospitals are legally required to offer. 

Something like 60 percent of people might qualify to have their hospital bills reduced or even forgiven through charity care — but of course nowhere close to 60 percent of people actually get that assistance. 

A lot of people just don’t know about it. (A survey our friends at Dollar For ran last year found that more than half of patients who might qualify for charity care had never even heard of it.)

Which raises a question: How exactly are hospitals telling you and me about charity care — you know fulfilling their legal obligation to let us know we just might qualify to have our medical bill forgiven? 

This is where you come in: we want to see a LOT of bills from hospitals. If you got one any time in the last year would you please you share it with us here? 

Even if you weren’t worried about how you’d pay — we just want to see what your hospital was saying about your options (like payment plans vs charity care). We want to see what’s in bold type and what’s in fine print.

And if you were at all worried about how to pay, we’d like to hear the story. Did anyone mention charity care to you? Or what? And how’s it going? 

We also need your help spreading the word to friends and family. Spread the word to your friends and family, share our form with them. 

Finally, if you’re looking for charity care support, or just to see if you might qualify, you can go to Dollar For’s website and use their screening tool to see if you’re eligible, and their team of amazing volunteers can take it from there. And you can find more information on charity care in our First Aid Kit newsletter.

That’s all for now. Here's a transcript of this short episode. We’ll be back with more new episodes in a few weeks. 

In the meantime, you can send us other stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

Of course we’d love for you to support this show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Georgann Boatright's local hospital told her she'd need to pay an $8,000 "operating room" charge for a test she was pretty darn sure wouldn't involve an operating room. So she went elsewhere, even though it meant driving to another state.

Avoiding that charge required more than just a willingness to go — literally — way out of her way. Georgann Boatright has knowledge, skills, and grit that most of us don't — although we can maybe learn a thing or two from her.

More and more, people are noticing sneaky new fees like the one Georgann spotted. They’re often called “facility fees,” and they’re kind of like a cover charge for walking through the door. 

Hospitals say these fees go toward overhead on facilities with lots of specialized equipment —places like emergency rooms. But these fees have been increasing in recent years — and becoming more common: As hospitals buy up doctor’s offices, patients are starting to see them tacked onto bills for routine trips to the doctor.

We asked you to send us stories about facility fees. We heard from a ton of you and learned so much. 

We’ve got lots of stories to share. And we’re starting with this epic tale — which also involves the biggest facility fee charge we saw in all your submissions. 

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

Of course we’d love for you to support this show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For months now, you’ve been sharing stories with us about facility fees, those sneaky fees that keep showing up on your medical bills. 

Facility fees are kind of like a cover charge for visiting a health care facility, usually one owned by a hospital. And many of you have been blindsided by them. 

Some of you have been going to the same place for years, only to one day get a brand new charge, seemingly out of nowhere. Many of you only found out about a facility fee after the fact, while some of you managed to avoid one by going somewhere else. Pretty much all of you were vexed, confused, and wanted answers. 

Next week, we’ll start unpacking these stories, starting with one that’s particularly epic. 

Stay tuned! 

In the meantime, got a story or tip you want to share? Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

And of course we’d love for you to support this show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Folks who expected their health insurance to cover some out-of-network care have been getting stuck with enormous bills instead. Like one couple from Kansas City: Their insurance hung them out to dry for thousands of dollars, all while sending statements touting a “discount” the couple was supposedly getting. 

Turned out: A middleman was cutting their coverage — actually a middleman’s middleman — working with their insurance company. The couple’s insurer got the “discount,” and the middlemen got big fees. 

And of course this couple wasn’t alone. A recent New York Times investigation from reporter Chris Hamby documented and explained this Russian-nesting-dolls-of-middlemen scheme. 

Insurance companies (middleman #1) work with a with a company called MultiPlan (middleman #2), which slashes the amounts the insurance plans actually pay for care.

To show how it all works — and what we can maybe do about it — we dive into the hidden mechanics of health insurance.  

Here's a transcript of this episode.

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We take our first look at Medicaid— the big, federally-funded health insurance program for folks with lower incomes— for two reasons: 

First, it’s a huge part of our health-care system. Medicaid covers a quarter of all Americans, and four in ten children. 

Second, it’s timely: In the last year, more than 20 million people have lost Medicaid — even though there’s evidence to suggest a lot of those people probably still qualify. 

More than two-thirds have been dropped for “procedural reasons” — basically, missing paperwork.

Of folks who’ve been dropped, 70 percent have ended up either uninsured, or — in most cases — back on Medicaid. 

This is all because of a process called “the unwinding” of COVID-emergency protections that kept folks from getting dropped at all for a few years. It’s been messy.

We’ve been hearing the stories of folks who got dropped, and their fights to get re-enrolled.  

In this episode, we hear about two families in Tennessee who lost coverage they were entitled to — including one family who lost their coverage after their mail got sent to a horse pasture — with help from KFF Health News reporter Brett Kelman. 

Here’s a transcript of this episode.

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

Of course we’d love for you to support this show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We’re launching a brand new project and need your help!

We’re zooming in on charges that are becoming more and more common on your medical bills: facility fees. 

Facility fees are charges tacked onto your bill for visiting a doctor’s office or clinic related to a hospital or larger health care system… or even talking with a doctor who’s in one of those places on a telehealth visit. 

If you’ve ever seen a charge for a facility fee on your medical bill, we want to hear from you. 

... and if you haven't, we'd love your help spreading the word!

Consider sharing our posts on any of these networks:

Instagram | TikTok | Facebook | Ex-Twtitter | LinkedIn

We’ll be back with more new episodes in a few weeks. 

In the meantime, send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

And of course we’d love for you to support this show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When a subsidiary of the giant UnitedHealth Group got hit by a cyberattack recently, a big chunk of the country’s doctors, pharmacists, hospitals and therapists just stopped getting paid. 

It’s been a huge disruption, with some providers wondering if they can keep their doors open.

But thanks to their huge size and reach, the situation may have had a silver lining — for United.

Which seems like a big problem, and got us wondering: What can we maybe do about it?

The answer turns out to be: Maybe more than we think, via antitrust enforcers at the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Strap in for a wild ride — and then maybe check out FTC Chair Lina Khan’s talk with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. We include some short excerpts, but the whole thing is worth a watch.

Thanks to reporters Brittany Trang (STAT News) and Maureen Tkacik (The American Prospect) for guiding us through their reporting.

And to the novelist/journalist/activist Cory Doctorow, who has been writing about antitrust enforcement for years. Here are a couple of his columns about Lina Khan and what she and other antitrust enforcers are up to.

If you want a deeper dive on the new antitrust movement: It’s summed up in a terrific (and short) book by Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor and former White House adviser: The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. 

And you may be able to get it for free! If your local library uses a system called Hoopla, you can borrow it as either an audiobook or an ebook.

Super-fun tangent: Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu went to elementary school together — and apparently played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons — when they were kids in Toronto. 

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

And of course we’d love for you to support this show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Reporter Bob Herman from STAT News unpacks his blockbuster investigation about the country’s biggest health care company.   

Covering the American health care system means we tell some scary stories. But this episode is almost like a horror movie. 

It’s got some of Hollywood’s favorite tropes: Machines taking over. Monsters from separate franchises meeting face to face in a new movie, like Godzilla and King Kong, or Jason and Freddy. And a couple perceptive folks warning everyone, ”Hey, look, something really bad is happening!” 

Those folks are Bob and his STAT News colleague Casey Ross. The monsters are United HealthGroup — a “behemoth” as one expert called them in an episode from last year — and Medicare Advantage, which we looked at in our last episode. And the “machines” belong to United.

Bob describes what some of United’s own employees said about the result: “For some of us, it's creating this moral crisis. Like we know that we are having to listen to an algorithm to essentially kick someone out of a nursing home, even though we know that they can barely walk 20 feet.” 

Scary stuff. But Bob and Casey’s reporting has caught the eye of some powerful people in government, and right now, Medicare Advantage plans are on notice from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the U.S. Senate is holding hearings, and the Department of Justice reportedly has an anti-trust investigation in the works. 

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

And of course we’d love for you to support this show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Health insurance sucks. Which leaves lots of us counting down the days until we turn 65 and can get on Medicare – the federal government’s health insurance program for seniors. 

But Medicare is a lot more complicated – and costs more money – than a lot of us realize. (Also, it involves insurance companies.) And:t There will be huge, complicated decisions to make when you turn 65, that can have huge consequences. 

The biggest, and most consequential: Choosing between original Medicare and Medicare Advantage – the privatized version sold by health insurance companies that’s advertised everywhere seniors look. 

Some folks who pick Medicare Advantage later regret it — but find there are no do-overs. 

We get the scoop from Reporter Sarah Jane Tribble, who’s been covering the story for KFF Health News and the Washington Post. 

And we get a preview: What do we all need to know before we hit 65 about the choices we’ll face? There are a lot of options, and a lot of price tags. Sarah Murdoch from the Medicare Right Center gives us an outline of those choices and their consequences — and supplies both tips and resources. 

The biggest: When it’s time for you -- or anyone you care about -- to make choices around Medicare, every state has a free source of unbiased advice and information: Here’s a link to find your State Health Insurance Assistance Program (or SHIP).

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

And of course we’d love for you to support this show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 developments. 

Plus, what does the explosion of drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have to do with the price of insulin? We break it down. 

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today we’re revisiting one of our favorite episodes from the archive – a story about giving – and bringing you an update.  

In 1980, a young father named Denny Buehler was battling leukemia and needed to travel from Cincinnati to Seattle for treatment. To raise the money, his friends and family threw a softball tournament. 

Denny passed away a few months later. But his friends and family turned the softball tournament into a beloved tradition, and a chance to give back. For more than 40 years, they’d host the games and sell hot dogs to raise money for people in the area who needed help with medical expenses. 

Then in 2019, the Denny Beuhler Memorial Fund found a way to make the money they’d fundraise go a hundred times farther. Literally. 

Inspired by a segment on Last Week Tonight, they partnered with a group to buy up old medical debt – and erase it. 

Now in 2024, that group – now known as Undue Medical Debt – has grown its influence and helped crush billions (!) in debt.

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

And again — we’d love for you to support this show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. 

In late 2020, Dan hit up self defense expert Lauren Taylor to get strategies for standing up for yourself, and hear how she’s applied her approach in her own fight for health care coverage. 

Since then, she’s published a book! It’s called Get Empowered: A Practical Guide to Thrive, Heal, and Embrace Your Confidence in a Sexist World. 

Extra tip: At the moment, the site bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores, has the best price.

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

And of course we’d love for you to support this show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 of this show’s community this year. You’re our reason for being, and our best sources.  

You’re also our biggest source of financial support, so I will ask one more time to pitch in now if you can. 

Thank you so much! We'll catch you in 2024.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 those partners, we’ve dug up some surprising (and possibly uplifting) news about lawsuits in three states – Maryland, New York and Wisconsin — and what that news might mean for the rest of the country.  

This is part two of a two-part series. In part one, we examined the phenomenon of hospitals suing patients in bulk – sometimes hundred or thousands at a time – over unpaid bills. 

We learned that in many cases, those patients are struggling financially, and that the lawsuits aren’t very lucrative for hospitals anyway. So why did they happen in the first place? As one former collections industry insider told us, those decisions are “philosophically based.” 

In this episode — before getting to those surprising/hopeful findings — we try to understand that “philosophy,” perhaps best described as: business-as-usual. We speak with a former hospital billing executive and a representative from the third-party collections industry. 

This series is produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

… and supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. 

Many of the patients getting sued are already facing financial hardship, or like one couple we interviewed, already in bankruptcy. 

Judgments against patients in these suits can be life changing. But according to experts, these lawsuits don’t recoup a ton of lost revenue for hospitals. So why do they happen? And what if hospitals stopped doing it completely? 

In this episode, we talk to a former sales rep for a medical-debt collections agency — who now steers hospitals away from efforts to collect money, via lawsuits or other means, from folks who just don’t have it.

He tells hospitals: This is better for your bottom line. 

Stay tuned for part two, coming in two weeks. 

… and to preview some of what’s in it — plus a whole lot more excellent reporting — check out the Baltimore Banner’s story: Maryland hospitals stopped suing patients with unpaid bills. Will they start again?

This series is produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

… and supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

OOH: And don’t forget. It’s prime time to make a donation and support this show. 

Here’s a transcript of this episode.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 they made the whole thing happen, and how this year’s Hollywood strikes changed their perspectives. 

Here’s a transcript of this episode.

ALSO: 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!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 a chat about how he got interested in medical debt, how medical debt became the massive problem it is today, and what he thinks people who work in health care can do to start to fix it.

ALSO: 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!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 satirizing the absurdities and cruel complexities of the American health care system have been a fan favorite for years among An Arm and a Leg listeners (and us too).

We’re sharing a delightful and moving conversation with Dr. G and his wife, educator Kristin Flanary (AKA @LadyGlaucomflecken online), from our pals at The Nocturnists, a podcast about the experiences of health care workers. 

As the Glaucomfleckens tell Nocturnists host Dr. Emily Silverman, the inspiration behind Flanary’s most biting videos. came from the couple’s experience dealing with health insurance after he suffered a near-fatal heart attack.

Check out the Nocturnists here or wherever you get your podcasts, and Dr. Glaucomflecken’s videos on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. 

Send your stories and questions for An Arm and a Leg, or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

And of course we'd love for you to support this show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 the patent system to extend their legal monopolies on medicine way beyond the standard 20 years, and how that leads to high drug prices here and abroad. 

And what we can maybe do about it. 

This episode starts in 2004, when India began the process of changing its patent laws to align with global trade rules. Activists there managed to carve out exceptions to the law to prevent some of the worst patent abuses. 

Fast forward to this year, when those legal safeguards become key to unlocking new doors in the fight against TB. 

Meanwhile, the proponents of those Indian safeguards are here in the U.S., pushing for drug patent reform here. Which not only could help Americans, but also influence global standards. 

Here's a transcript of this episode. 

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

And of course we'd love for you to support this show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 — primarily places far away from the U.S.

But the reason this TB drug costs so much overseas is also one of the main reasons that important drugs here are so expensive — drugs like insulin, Humira and… well, just about everything:  

Legalistic patent games that pharma companies have mastered. 

So, in addition to John Green — and yes, we talked with John Green — we also talked with one of the world’s leading experts on drug-patent games, Tahir Amin.

Also, John Green is a great storyteller. So hearing him tell the story of how he became obsessed with tuberculosis is bittersweet.

And in order to make sense of any of this, we had to dig into the story of how John Green and his brother Hank became (and remain) YouTube superstars. 

For more than 16 years, they’ve been building a community of “nerdfighters” — nerds fighting to make the world a better place. It’s a profoundly sweet and fun story, and everything we’re trying to do here owes them a debt. 

Oh, finally:  This is, as you’re probably guessing by now, an epic story.  It’s gonna take two full episodes of An Arm and a Leg to tell it all.  

So, we hope you enjoy part one. There’s more coming in a few weeks.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 might remember our recent episode about United HealthGroup, and how it's become a behemoth in recent years. That story started with a complaint from a doc in New York.

... who had a lot more tips than I could run down — or fit in one episode — and they weren't all just about United.

ProPublica's Cezary Podkul took the time to verify a big one: About zillions of dollars in fees that docs are paying — dollars that ultimately come out of our pockets — just to get paid.

Oh, and: If you aren't getting our First Aid Kit newsletter, this is a great time to sign up. We've started a series about how to fight with insurance that, unfortunately, a lot of us are gonna need at some point.

We'll be back in a few weeks, with John Green, TB, and the fight over drug prices.

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

And of course we’d love for you to support this show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Longtime listeners to this show know we’ve been talking about something called “charity care” for years. Federal law requires that all nonprofit hospitals have charity care policies – that is, financial assistance policies — to reduce or remove people’s medical bills. 

The problem: people don’t know about it, and hospitals don’t always make it easy to access. New research suggests that the scale of this problem is huge: hospitals are failing to provide more than 14 billion dollars worth of charity care to people who qualify for it. Instead, that money becomes medical debt.

That research comes from the nonprofit Dollar For, an organization dedicated to helping people get charity care. We’ve been talking with Dollar For’s founder, Jared Walker, for years – following his team on their mission to crush medical debt, one charity care application at a time. 

Jared brings us up to speed on Dollar For’s latest research, their efforts to reach hospitals, and how new programs targeting medical debt in places like North Carolina may change things. 

That new program in North Carolina is estimated to wipe out $4 billion in medical debt. We look into how it took shape. 

Plus, we meet Clara, a listener who used her impressive research chops to get charity care from a hospital in New York. In the process, she crafted an expert charity care appeal letter, and shared a template with us. 

Use case: the hospital has denied you charity care after you applied, or offered you less than you need. Here’s the template. 

Of course, Dollar For has tons of resources, including a tool to help you quickly figure out if you qualify for help. And staff to help if you get stuck. Start here: https://dollarfor.org/help/

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

Of course we’d love for you to support this show. This month, every dollar you give gets matched dollar-for-dollar, by NewsMatch, from the Institute for Nonprofit News."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 Month, a series from NPR and KFF Health News.). 

And we find out how ambulance bills ended up being so random — a story that takes us back to the 1970’s. 

Plus, what you can do if you get hit with an out-of-network ambulance bill:

• See if you can negotiate a better deal
• See if you might qualify for financial assistance. (Here’s some detailed guidance from Jared Walker of Dollar For.)
• See if you’re protected under state law. At least ten states have passed laws protecting some patients from surprise ambulance bills. Check here to see if yours is one of them. 

Want to share your thoughts on how Congress should deal with out-of-network ambulance bills? A federal advisory committee wants to hear them. You can email them here.

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

And of course we’d love for you to support this show.

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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’ sometimes-rival, the powerful pharmaceutical industry lobby, is flooding the airwaves with ads attacking them. 

There’s been a little news since 2019: Although Congress is still catching up, all 50 states have passed some laws pertaining to how PBMs work. We’ve got an update on that. 

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

And of course we’d love for you to support this show.

Correction: A previous version of this episode misidentified the parent company of Express Scripts.

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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 product, including specialized credit cards and financing plans pushed by hospitals and other providers.

They can come with steep interest rates, and (surprise, surprise) the terms aren’t always spelled out clearly. 

The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been issuing reports, including a handy FAQ, but hasn’t taken enforcement action in a decade.

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

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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 over the years, and which the original tweet called “genius” — as in Evil Genius. When the boss who’s paying you late offers to front you money, at interest, to tide you over, it does sound like… a conflict of interest.

It turns out, because UnitedHealth Group is such a big, complex enterprise, it’s not quite that simple. 

But UnitedHealth Group’s size and complexity turns out to be the story. The company has grown into a “behemoth,” running the country’s biggest insurance company, and becoming the biggest employer of doctors, while also running big parts of the business-side back end for big chunks of the health care ecosystem. 

As one expert told us, “There's very little good news about what happens when these organizations. or these sectors of health care get bigger.” Costs and prices tend to go up, without a bump in quality.

And regulators, we learned, have struggled to keep up. 

It’s a wild ride with a sobering conclusion — and very much worth taking. 

As the expert who labeled United a behemoth wrote: “United has grown to its present immense scale largely without public knowledge.” Now we know. And knowledge is the beginning of power. 

BONUS TIP: This story reminded us of themes and insights from novelist, journalist, and activist Cory Doctorow, especially his recent book Chokepoint Capitalism and his recent essays about the “enshittification” of online life.

We also like Cory’s novels a lot, and have learned a ton from them. They’re often called science fiction, but the tech is usually present-day, or about a month into the future. His latest, Red Team Blues, is a smart, fun techno-thriller. 

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

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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 with us — including some key legal terms that can provide leverage.

Abigail has written up a guide to her strategy, and she’s given us permission to share it. You’ll find it — lightly edited, and with some additional insights from our talk with her, over on First Aid Kit.

Warning: No silver bullets here. It’s still really, really hard. But Abigail has definitely got some hard-won insights we can use. 

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

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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 episode. 

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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 that seems unlikely in today’s political climate, well: Ben Taub’s wild origin story was plenty unlikely too. 

That story takes us to the 1960’s, when Dutch novelist and playwright Jan de Hartog moved to Houston. He fell in love with the bustling, futuristic home of NASA and the Astrodome. 

But he also discovered the city’s dreadful underside: a neglected charity hospital where largely African-American patients are left to seek health care in unsanitary and unsafe — hellish — conditions. 

De Hartog and a group of Quaker volunteers waged a campaign to change that, and eventually found an unlikely ally who brought it over the finish line. 

The People's Hospital is a heck of a book. We might want to start a book group someday, just to talk about it. If you want to grab a copy, here’s a link. (Or: Audiobook, or ebook.)

Here’s a transcript of the episode. 

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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 us — and how to use that information. 

We also got advice on dealing with debt collectors — when it makes sense to file a dispute — from April Kuenhoff, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center. 

She shared resources too. Here are sample letters — templates you can edit:

• To tell a debt collector that you are disputing a charge. 
• To demand verification of a debt they say you owe
• To limit their legal right to harass you. 

Here’s a transcript of the episode. 

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“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 small claims court to fight messed-up medical bills? Like, a lot more people? — and we’ll be exploring it in the coming months. 

Meanwhile, Lauren’s story has lessons for all of us. For instance, even though she lost her case, she doesn’t expect to pay a cent. 

Here’s a transcript of the episode. 

Want to try some of Lauren’s tactics? 

Looking up billing codes: The latest First Aid Kit newsletter is all about fact-checking medical bills and includes a section about examining billing codes. We'll go deeper on those codes in the next installment. 

Dealing with debt collectors: We discussed knowing your rights when dealing with debt collectors with a couple of experts in this very-fun episode.

Lauren got her dealing-with-debt-collectors playbook from journalist and friend-of-the-show Marshall Allen. His book, Never Pay the First Bill, includes a template of a letter you can send to a debt collector, challenging them to document their claim.

Exploring small claims court: We first got tipped off to this aggressive approach in a story we re-played recently: Can They Freaking Do That?!? 

... and followed up with the story of Jeffrey Fox, who successfully used small claims court to force a big hospital to refund a $2,000 charge. David vs. Goliath.  

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

And of course we’d love for you to support this show.

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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 random lab hit you up for money — and then threaten you with a late fee of more than $1,000??

We went to find out.

The answer: They can try. And a lot of the time, they’ll get away with it. But we found experts who explain how, sometimes, we can fight back— by threatening to take them to court.

If you’ve got the time and the moxie, these experts say you’re on solid legal ground, and you really can make the other side accept a fair offer.

We’ll come back to this idea next time. Meanwhile, here’s a 2020 episode with the story of a guy who took his local hospital to court, and won.

The original version of this story, from 2019, found us learning about a couple topics we went on to explored in more depth later:  Surprise bills — which we got new legal protections from in 2022— and the role of private equity in health care, both how it’s been expanding, and how some doctors are trying to fight back.  

Here's a transcript of this episode.

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Several listeners sent us an article with the headline Make your health insurance cry, about a new AI tool to fight health insurance. We had to learn more. 

Meet Holden Karau: a Bay Area software engineer who says she’s “trying to make health insurance suck a little bit less.”

So she’s created an AI tool to appeal insurance denials.

Her project, Fight Health Insurance, is a labor of love (she’s not earning money from it) and fueled by hatred (of insurance companies). 

It draws on her tech expertise and on her years of experience fighting health insurance: for gender-affirming care, for rehab after getting hit by a car, and even for her dog, Professor Timbit. 

We talked with Holden about what it took to build the tool, how it works, and what she hopes comes next.

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

Of course we’d love for you to support this show. This month, every dollar you give gets matched dollar-for-dollar, by NewsMatch, from the Institute for Nonprofit News.

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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, thanks to NewsMatch and the Institute for Nonprofit News. Holy cow, what a deal. Here, go for it.

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

Send your stories and questions or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 started to wonder whether Susan’s troubles could be related to broader accusations against her insurer, Ambetter, the largest provider of plans on the Obamacare marketplace.  

Here’s a transcript of this episode.

We’d love for you to support this show.

Now is a great time to do it. This month, every dollar you donate is DOUBLED, thanks to NewsMatch and the Institute for Nonprofit News.

Holy cow, what a deal. Here, go for it.

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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 experience turned into one of the most difficult videos he’s ever made — and this is a guy whose old job had him tracing things like Zelda storylines across decades-long franchises. 

You can watch the full video here. 

Other delightful BDG creations discussed in this episode:

• The two-minute video that launched his career.
• His 15-minute dive into the Legend of Zelda
• A cooking demo: “Welcome to my weird ice creams.” Yum.

Special thanks to Wil Williams, Sarah Ballema, Josh Rubino, and Bea Bosco for adding their voices to this episode!

AND: We’d love for you to support this show. Now is a great time to do it. This month, every dollar you donate is DOUBLED, thanks to NewsMatch and the Institute for Nonprofit News. Holy cow, what a deal. Here, go for it.

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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 people can’t afford to.

But there are organizations who have been tackling this issue for decades — abortion funds. 

We’re big fans of when regular people find a way to help each other survive this messed-up, profit-driven health care system — and abortion funds are a huge example of that kind of effort. There’s a lot we can learn from them. 

We talk with Oriaku Njoko, executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, and Tyler Barbarin, a board member with the New Orleans Abortion Fund, to learn from their experience. 

Here's a transcript of this episode.

We’d love for you to support this show. Now is a great time to do it. This month, every dollar you donate is DOUBLED, thanks to NewsMatch and the Institute for Nonprofit News. Holy cow, what a deal. Here, go for it.

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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!  

• Do you live in a state that expanded Medicaid?
• What are the financial-assistance policies like at the hospitals around you?
• What kind of health care do you know you’re going to need?

We had expert help here:   Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, and . Jared Walker, founder of Dollar For, and a super-expert on charity care.  

If you want to go deeper:

• We did a three-part series on picking health insurance in our First Aid Kit newsletter. Start here. 
• An episode from last year explored some more dos and don’ts for picking health insurance.
• In a 2018 episode, we talked with another listener — a “financial therapist” — who had her own deep questions about health insurance. 

We’d love for you to support this show. Now is a great time to do it.

This month, every dollar you donate is DOUBLED, thanks to NewsMatch and the Institute for Nonprofit News. Holy cow, what a deal.

Here, go for it.

• Here’s a transcript of this episode.
• Send your stories and questions: https://armandalegshow.com/contact/ or call 724 ARM-N-LEG

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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 for dealing with the out-of-control medical system.

Starting today, First Aid Kit is back — publishing monthly instead of every-other-week. (We're telling you, Dan was pushing too hard before.)

If you're already a subscriber, you should have a new issue in your inbox right now. If you're not a subscriber yet, why not sign up?

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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 the state’s way. 

Further listening:

• How insulin got so horribly expensive was one of the first stories we covered on this show. Here’s that story-- a version we ran in 2021, including updates on what citizen-scientists, hackers, and activists are up to: https://armandalegshow.com/episode/revisiting-insulin/
• One of the biggest possible obstacles to California’s plan is the power of middleman companies called pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. We unpacked their role, their power, and the profits they make when drug prices are high, in this 2019 episode:  https://armandalegshow.com/episode/why-are-drug-prices-so-random-meet-mr-pbm/ 
• … and here’s a deep dive on the devious, clever games among PBMs, pharma companies, and insurance companies — games where we, people who need medicine, always lose. https://armandalegshow.com/episode/swimming-with-sharks/ 

Also, we mention our recent coverage of the legal and lobbying power of the pharmaceutical industry. That’s in our last episode, here:  https://armandalegshow.com/episode/congress-fixed-a-piece-of-medicare/ 

Here’s a transcript of this episode.

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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 industry fought this change tooth and nail — for decades. Julie Rovner, Chief National Correspondent for Kaiser Health News, takes us on a journey back to the late 1980’s, when Congress learned the cost of messing with Big Pharma. 

• Transcript
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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, financial assistance that most US hospitals are legally required to offer. That was early 2021. 

Next, a group of whip-smart volunteers helped Dollar For develop a user-friendly system to help folks apply for that assistance. Dollar For also started holding open trainings on Zoom, teaching people the ins and outs of applying for charity care—and helping others to do so. They say their work to date has helped erase more than $18 million in medical debt. 

But lots of people who can’t afford their medical bills don’t qualify for charity care. So Dollar For is trying something new: what they’re calling a “negotiation lab” for gaming out the best way to negotiate with hospitals and debt collectors. 

We listen-in on one of Dollar For’s real-life negotiations with a debt collector and take notes. 

• Here’s a transcript of the episode.
• Send your stories and questions: https://armandalegshow.com/contact/ or call 724 ARM-N-LEG
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Is it possible for a health care company to make enough people mad about their billing practices that it hurts their business? For one genetic testing company, maybe so. 

An Arm and a Leg listener Jessica got a test that’s become routine in early pregnancy: non-invasive prenatal testing. It was supposed to be $99. But then — after she took the test — that turned into $250. And when she asked questions, she was told it could go up to $800 if she didn’t pay up quick. , Jessica looked up the testing company, and found out that lots of people experienced what she called “the genetic testing bait-and-switch.”

And she’s not the only one who noticed.

When some guys on Wall Street, plus New York Times reporter Sarah Kliff, started hearing about those bills, the company found itself in some hot water. 

Here’s a transcript of the episode. 

Bonus reading:

• Sarah Kliff and Aatish Bhatia’s reporting on non-invasive prenatal testing
• A scorching report on Natera from Hindenburg Research
• Andrew Rice’s story on Hindenburg Research: "The Last Sane Man on Wall Street" 

Send your stories and questions: https://armandalegshow.com/contact/ or call 724 ARM-N-LEG

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Something different: We talk with journalist Cara Anthony about topics that don’t always come up in conversations about the cost of health care. 

For the last four years, she’s been reporting on the public health effects of racism, violence, and intergenerational trauma in a small Missouri town.. The result: A new documentary and podcast series called Silence in Sikeston.   

She sat down with us to talk about the value of breaking silences and the possibility for healing. 

Here’s a transcript of this episode. 

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

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Thomas Fisher is an emergency room doc in Chicago. His book, The Emergency, is an up-close chronicle of the COVID pandemic’s first year in his South Side ER. 

It also zooms out to tell the story of his journey as a doctor: How his upbringing on the South Side fueled his desire to become a doctor. And how the realities and inequities of American health care limited his ability to help. 

He details how the failures of the American health care system — and the racial inequities it perpetuates — leave health care workers with a profound sense of moral injury. 

“Over time, when you have this conflict between what you can do and what you're supposed to do—what you wish you could do, what you're trained to do—that creates a moral conundrum….It also leads a lot of people to leave the profession ” 

For a time, Fisher himself stepped away from practicing medicine. The journey took him to the executive suite but ultimately landed him back in the ER where he started.

On the street outside the hospital where Fisher works, he sits down with host Dan Weissmann to discuss the book and his search for meaning in the daily sprint of life in the ER. 

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About a third of ER doctors now work for companies backed by private equity. A lot of those docs do not like the arrangement, which they say puts profits ahead of patients. Now, a group of ER docs are suing to kick one of those private-equity owned companies out of their hospital-- and all of California. They see it as the first step in a long, long fight. 

The suit cites California’s ban on the “corporate practice of medicine” — which is supposed to outlaw situations where non-doctors tell doctors what to do, for profit. 

Which raises a question: How did it get left to a group of doctors to get that law enforced? 

We break it down, with help from:

• Dr. Lisa Moreno, immediate past president of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine which filed the lawsuit.
• Law professor Erin Fuse Brown, who has written about private equity’s growing role in medicine.
• Legendary financial reporter Gretchen Morgenson, now at NBC News, who has been reporting on private equity’s role in medicine since 2020, and whose reporting tipped us off to this lawsuit. 

And while you're here, why not:

• Subscribe to our newsletter
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Credit reporting bureaus announced in April that they would start taking most medical debt off of people’s credit reports. At first, we weren’t sure that would be such a huge deal. After all, the medical debt would still exist, people would still get harassed by debt collectors, or even sued over it.

But it turns out, there’s a bunch of reasons why these changes could be life-changing, and we want to give credit (the good kind) where it’s due. 

The changes include:

• Paid-off medical debt disappears from credit reports on July 1, 2022
• Debts under $500 (even if you haven’t paid them) come off reports in March 2023
• Medical bills under $500 that you received after March 1, 2022 should will never be counted on your credit report
• No medical bills – of any size– will appear on your credit report until they’re at least a year old, starting July 1, 2022

Plus, some an end to some games debt collectors can play with your credit score. 

Here’s a transcript of this episode.

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A new golden age is dawning, and it starts where the sun don’t shine.

A listener got a pricey quote for her colonoscopy, but the medical practice behind it seems like “the only game in town.” We scope it out and learn the surprising reason why: Investors have decided your butt is a goldmine. 

Private equity investors have made their way into many areas of our lives. Now, they’re at the gastroenterologist’s —and lots of other medical specialists, too. We learned why these doctors are selling their practices to private equity, and what it could mean for your health care and your bills. 

Correction notice: The original version of this story mis-identified the organization where Claire McAndrew worked when we spoke to her in 2019. Whoops. We've updated the audio file, so it's correct now.

Here's a transcript for this episode.

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