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:...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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’...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

“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...

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...