Why ‘The Pitt’ is our fave new drama

People who work in real-life emergency rooms have raved about how accurately the new drama The Pitt (Max) captures the dynamics and the medical details of their workplaces. Here at An Arm and a Leg, we’ve been nerding out about how the show depicts the financial forces that shape the ER’s day-to-d…

Winning a two-year fight over a bogus bill

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…

A medical-debt watchdog gets sidelined by the new administration

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 hel…

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

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 Davenpo…

How do you deal with wild drug prices?

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 ge…

The ‘Shkreli Awards’ — for dysfunction and profiteering in health care

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 t…

This is An Arm and a Leg

An Arm and a Leg is a show about why health care costs so freaking much, and what we can (maybe) do about it. New episodes every three weeks.

A listener fighting the good fight

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 patie…

Revisiting ‘Christmas In July’

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 t…

New lessons from the fight for charity care

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 k…