An Arm and a Leg

We kick off SEASON-19, about the cost of COVID, with a dose of hope — a story about an unlikely chain of people coming together to speed PPE to a COVID hospital in Brooklyn. NYC is a couple weeks ahe…

This bonus episode turns the tables: Ace reporter Sally Herships interviews Arm and a Leg host Dan Weissmann, about what he's learned so far, and what's ahead for the show. \They dig into the stories…

They say the problem with relying on journalists to embarrass providers into caving on crazy bills is, there aren’t enough journalists to go around. Fair. But sometimes journalists can scale up.

In Me…

A woman 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 a qu…

Sarah Macsalka has seen the stories about how expensive an emergency room visit can be, even for a minor complaint.

So when her seven year-old son Cameron gashed his knee on a weekend morning in June,…

It would sound a LOT like Explanation of Benefits, which is a musical revue that actually played in New York City in 2019.

... so it would feature a parody of "Bills, Bills, Bills" — the 1999 Destiny'…

Meredith Balogh has spent years learning to navigate the financial side of the health-care system. She’s a type-one diabetic, she’s never had a lot of money, and for years she didn’t have health insu…

Stephanie Wittels Wachs has a daughter born with hearing loss, which is how she found out insurance didn't cover hearing aids for kids. Those start at $6,000 and only last a few years. Stephanie team…

It’s going to be REALLY fun. Also, maybe useful. Catch you here soon!

Also, here’s a little video preview.

Bonus news: Did you know we're nominated for an award as a TRUE CRIME show?

Almost too perfect…

For our Season 2 finale, time for some inspiration.

For 30 years, James Gingerich has run a super-effective clinic in Indiana, delivering great results at low cost — to high-need, low-income patients.

…

Dr. Saul Weiner is a physician and researcher at Jesse Brown VA Medical Center and the University of Illinois at Chicago. (Photo: Roberta Dupuis-Devlin)

Researcher Saul Weiner has been sending fake pa…

That’s the rude awakening Eric Umansky got when he called the company that provided his CPAP machine — a device that helps him breathe at night.

He got mad. And he got even, in a way: Eric is an edito…

The price of insulin is iconic — doubling, tripling, multiplying like crazy, for medicine Type 1 diabetics can’t live without.

To understand it, we went back almost 100 years and dug up a story of swe…

As we started working on season two of this podcast, there was one topic that seemed like we just had to look at: insulin.

… and I wondered: There are stories about insulin prices everywhere. Would we…

I filled a prescription recently, and the drugstore said they wanted more than 700 bucks… for an old-line generic drug. My insurance ended up knocking that down, but it was WEIRD. And it meant a big …

This week, we look at three MRIs with four different price tags, and an enormous range. 

Liz Salmi and a view of her brain. (Photo: Kaiser Health News)

The first two price tags come from listener Liz S…

Hospital bills are too high, and insurance doesn’t cover enough. Turns out, that’s a crisis for hospitals too: more and more of us aren’t paying those bills, because we can’t. So, they’re getting cre…