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PODCAST

An Arm and a Leg

An Arm and a Leg

An Arm and a Legis a podcast about why health care costs so freaking much and what we can (maybe) do about it. If you’ve ever been surprised by a medical bill, you’re in good company. But as our team of seasoned journalists has learned from years of reporting — you’re not always helpless. We don’t have all the answers, but we’ll offer you tools and big picture insights with plenty of humor and heart. An Arm and a Leg is co-produced with KFF Health News and

society & culture documentary

All Episodes

23:40

Winning a two-year fight over a bogus bill

An Arm and a Leg ·

2025/03/20

A few months ago, we got a note from a listener named Meagan, who wanted to thank us. She said the stories she heard on this show had given her the advice and encouragement she needed to finally win a fight against a medical bill she didn’t owe — a battle she’d been waging for more than two years. As Meagan tells us, those two years were filled with wild twists and turns and a lot of disappointment. We hear what kept her motivated and encouraged despite all the setbacks – and

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19:31

A medical-debt watchdog gets sidelined by the new...

An Arm and a Leg ·

2025/02/27

A federal agency called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — CFPB for short — has taken big steps to help people with medical debt. In early February, the Trump administration moved to effectively shutter the agency. We talked with credit counselor Lara Ceccarelli about how the CFPB has helped clients at the nonprofit where she works, and how she’s navigating the sudden change. And consumer-rights advocate Chi Chi Wu — an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center

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4:49

Big news: Our ‘First Aid Kit’ newsletter is now weekly

An Arm and a Leg ·

2025/02/24

Hey – real quick: some big news from the team at An Arm and a Leg. Our First Aid Kit newsletter is going weekly! First Aid Kit brings you advice from our show and more on how to survive and navigate America’s health care system. And allow us to introduce First Aid Kit’s new writer, Claire Davenport. When she was our intern last summer, she reviewedAn Arm and a Leg’s entire catalog of episodes, and took notes along the way. Now she’s bringing the practical lessons from

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9:33

How do you deal with wild drug prices?

An Arm and a Leg ·

2025/02/03

We’re kicking off a new reporting project about how much we pay for our medicine — and what we can maybe do about it — and we want to hear your stories. Because: Getting a case of sticker shock with a prescription happens all the time. So we’re asking: What have you done — or tried to do — to get the medicines you need at prices you can afford? And what did you learn that might be useful for other people to know? Maybe you learned a strategy that actually WORKED

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25:26

The ‘Shkreli Awards’ — for dysfunction and...

An Arm and a Leg ·

2025/01/16

You remember a guy named Martin Shkreli? If his name rings a bell, it’s probably because back in 2015, he jacked up the price of an old drug — from around $13 a pill to $750. The media dubbed him “the pharma bro,” and he became a symbol of brazen pharmaceutical greed.Now, he’s the namesake for the Shkreli Awards — a kind of Oscars for the most outrageous examples of greed, fraud, and general brokenness in American health care.Every year, a health care think tank called the Lown Institute ranks the

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0:57

This is An Arm and a Leg

An Arm and a Leg ·

2025/01/06

An Arm and a Legis a show about why health care costs so freaking much, and what we can (maybe) do about it. New episodes every three weeks. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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11:47

A listener fighting the good fight

An Arm and a Leg ·

2024/12/30

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

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27:19

Revisiting ‘Christmas In July’

An Arm and a Leg ·

2024/12/12

Hey there. It’s a great time to support our work. Right now, every gift gets matched! Here’s where to do it. 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

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28:06

New lessons from the fight for charity care

An Arm and a Leg ·

2024/11/22

Hey, first: This is a GREAT time to support us — right now, every gift gets matched!Click here to support us.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

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22:28

Fight health insurance — with help from AI

An Arm and a Leg ·

2024/11/01

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

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24:34

Can racism make you sick?

An Arm and a Leg ·

2024/10/17

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

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31:48

Special Feature: A Beloved Nursing Home, from “To See...

An Arm and a Leg ·

2024/10/01

We're sharing an episode of “To See Each Other,” about a question that’s SUPER-relevant to this show: How do we pay for long-term care, like nursing homes?To See Each Other aims to complicate the narrative about small-town Americans. In this new season, host George Goehl heads to Lincoln County, Wisconsin — population, 28,000-and-some. And home to a publicly-run nursing home with a 5-star quality rating from the feds.A conservative county board plans to sell the home to a private operator, but

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23:31

“Baby steps” in the fight against facility fees

An Arm and a Leg ·

2024/09/26

An $88 “observation room” fee for a check-up didn’t sit right with Kari Greene, a listener from Oregon. When the price went up to $99 the next year, Kari complained to her benefits rep; they thought it was weird, too — but couldn’t do anything about it.In states like Connecticut and Indiana, legislators are trying to do something about fees like these – often called “facility fees.”In this episode, we go deep on Kari’s bill, one of dozens that listeners have shared with us over the past few

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27:10

Anatomy of a Fall: One rural hospital’s ransomware...

An Arm and a Leg ·

2024/09/05

What happens when a hospital gets hit by a ransomware attack? We’re sharing an episode from a podcast called Click Here that takes us inside the aftermath of a cyber attack on a rural hospital in Oregon.The story starts the minute the hospital’s IT director finds out they’ve been hacked, and follows him and his colleagues as they scramble to keep the place running while they try to get it back online.It’s a fascinating adventure, and it gives us a window into the growing problem of cyberattacks in

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24:11

Don’t get “bullied” into paying what you don’t owe

An Arm and a Leg ·

2024/08/15

Caitlyn Mai expected her share of a recent surgery bill to be about $2,000, with insurance covering the rest.Then she started getting alerts on her phone from the hospital that she owed $139,000 — the full cost of her surgery.But Caitlyn, a legal assistant in Oklahoma, instinctively knew a cardinal rule of the American healthcare system — “never pay the first bill.”It’s a lesson we first heard from the journalist Marshall Allen, whose 2021 book Never Pay the First Bill serves as a how-to guide for

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3:06

We want to see your hospital bills

An Arm and a Leg ·

2024/07/25

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

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25:30

The woman who beat an $8,000 hospital fee

An Arm and a Leg ·

2024/07/11

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

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2:02

Coming soon: your stories on facility fees

An Arm and a Leg ·

2024/07/03

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

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24:54

Meet the Middleman’s Middleman

An Arm and a Leg ·

2024/06/13

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

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23:05

Staying on Medicaid seems tougher than it should be

An Arm and a Leg ·

2024/05/23

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,

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162 results

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