An Arm and a Leg

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 episode. Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.Of course we’d love for you to support this show.

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 senior citizens aren’t having it. They show up to board meetings, march in the Labor Day parade, and fight with… their last breath.George goes deep into questions of aging in America, public versus private versions of long-term care, and the nuts and bolts of organizing. The show aims to put you in a fighting mood, and to think differently about aging.

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 months. And we talk with Christine Monahan, a researcher and attorney who knows more about facility fees — and state efforts to limit them — than any other expert in the country.Here’s a transcript of this episode. Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.Of course we’d love for you to support this show.

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 health care – why places like hospitals have become such a major target for cyber-criminals and how the industry is dealing with it. Click Here is a bi-weekly tech news podcast from Recorded Future News, hosted by Dina Temple-Raston. We’ll be back with more episodes of An Arm and a Leg in a few weeks.Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.Of course we’d love for you to support this show.

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 anyone facing down a potentially bogus medical bill, and whose passing earlier this year left a giant hole in the hearts of many. This episode is an extended version of a recent installment of the NPR and KFF Health News series Bill of the Month. Here’s a transcript of this episode. Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.Of course we’d love for you to support this show.

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 friends at Dollar For ran last year found that more than half of patients who might qualify for charity care had never even heard of it.)Which raises a question: How exactly are hospitals telling you and me about charity care — you know fulfilling their legal obligation to let us know we just might qualify to have our medical bill forgiven? This is where you come in: we want to see a LOT of bills from hospitals. If you got one any time in the last year would you please you share it with us here? Even if you weren’t worried about how you’d pay — we just want to see what your hospital was saying about your options (like payment plans vs charity care). We want to see what’s in bold type and what’s in fine print.And if you were at all worried about how to pay, we’d like to hear the story. Did anyone mention charity care to you? Or what? And how’s it going? We also need your help spreading the word to friends and family. Spread the word to your friends and family, share our form with them. Finally, if you’re looking for charity care support, or just to see if you might qualify, you can go to Dollar For’s website and use their screening tool to see if you’re eligible, and their team of amazing volunteers can take it from there. And you can find more information on charity care in our First Aid Kit newsletter.That’s all for now. Here's a transcript of this short episode. We’ll be back with more new episodes in a few weeks. In the meantime, you can send us other stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.Of course we’d love for you to support this show.