An Arm and a Leg

Economist Vivian Ho has been researching the US health care system for four decades. These days she focuses on what she describes as the biggest burden on the average American: runaway hospital prices and rising health insurance premiums. (You know, Arm and a Leg stuff.) 

And she’s developed a strategy for addressing high insurance premiums – one based on a real-life success story.

So when she asked us to help her ...

A listener named Thomas Sanford wrote to us earlier this year, asking for help with a little DIY project. And it’s turned into the most encouraging thing we’ve seen all year.

With input from the Arm and a Leg community — specifically folks who get our First Aid Kit newsletter — Thomas has drafted a one-page handout, packed with resources for anyone who needs help with medical bills.

It’s ready for you ...

For the first time, our senior producer, Emily, has to sign up for Obamacare. And it turns out, it’s one heck of a year to do that. 

A recent headline from KFF Health News reads: “Insurers and customers brace for double whammy to Obamacare premiums.”

We break down what those “whammies” might mean in dollars and cents for Emily and the millions of others signing up for Obamacare in 2026.  ...

Hey first! We need your help: Financial help. Donations from listeners power this show, and we’ve got a goal: 100 people making their first-ever gift, this week. 

If you haven’t chipped in before, this is a great time — just click here.

OK, onwards…

Sharing a favorite from our archive – with lessons that are as relevant as ever. 

Laurie Todd calls herself The Insurance Warrior. She fights he...

When a New York couple purchased a health insurance plan from a telemarketer, everything sounded legit. Meds, doctors, tests?  All covered.

But it didn't take long for them to realize they'd been “hustled” – ending up with bills for thousands of dollars, and leaving them no choice but to skip important medical care. 

In their series “Health Care Hustlers,” Bloomberg reporters Zach Mider and Z...

As a follow-up to our series The Prescription Drug Playbook — all about how you can get the meds you need at a price you can (maybe) afford — we’re stepping back to look at the big picture. 

From the start of this podcast, we’ve been trying to answer a major question: Why do my meds cost so freaking much? And we’ve highlighted the profit-seeking games that insurance, pharma, and middlemen play all...

In February, we asked you, our listeners, to share the tips, tricks, and tactics you’ve learned for getting the medicine you need at prices you can manage. 

And of course some of you work in health care and have insider knowledge. Which we’re passing along in this second episode of The Prescription Drug Playbook.

We’ll hear from a listener who works to help seniors find healthcare, a pharma sales rep, an empl...

In surveys, one in four Americans report having to skip their medications due to cost. We asked our listeners: what strategies have you used when you’ve been hit with pharmacy sticker shock? 

We heard from a ton of you – with stories, strategies and workarounds that surprised and encouraged us.

None of them will work for everybody. This is a set of patches and bandaids for a broken system. But if there’s one ...

What do the KGB and the former CEO of Cincinnati Children's Hospital have in common?

At different times, they’ve each looked to a guy named Eugene Litvak for help. He only said yes to Cincinnati — but he saved that hospital more than a hundred million dollars a year.

For the last few decades, Litvak – a Soviet émigré with a PhD in math – has been on a mission: save U.S. hospitals from financial...

With news blasting from Washington like a firehose, it feels impossible to take it all in — to stay on top of all the changes the Trump administration has been trying to make. 

But for health care, one person is probably closer to anyone than to understanding the full picture: KFF Heath News Chief Washington Correspondent Julie Rover.    

In this episode, Julie helps us see that picture, by telling us...

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-day problems like crowding, eternal wait times, and scary bills. 

For this episode, we got Dr. Alex Janke, an emergency m...

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 ...

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-right...

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 reviewed An Arm and a Leg’s entire catalog of episod...

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 fo...

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 gener...

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...