An Arm and a Leg

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...

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 the softball tou...

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 scale of this problem is huge: hos...

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 ...

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 t...

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 t...

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...

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 ...