https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6QvGQja1N8 We hear it over and over again – the private sector just does it better. Whether we’re talking education or healthcare or our criminal justice system, the default Republican (and sometimes Democratic) talking point is that competition in the marketplace allows the best ideas and best people (Elon Musk, lookin at you) to rise to the top and lead us to a utopian future (sponsored by Meta). But then something wild happens like the cyberattack on UnitedHealthcare, which is causing massive fallout throughout our healthcare system over the past two weeks ..read more

Occasional fistfights aside, most of our legislators make the choice to use their words when they’re angry, and a lot of those words go into public letters they write to presidents, officials, and even each other. Despite the fact that no one else in this country has written or read a letter in decades, the public comment letter is still popular with politicians, who have elevated this obscure literary genre to a competitive sport, using these letters to demonstrate their power, build alliances, and shape policy. Today we’re going to focus on one ongoing battle of letters over one of our favor ..read more

Here at the Medicare for All Podcast, we love calling out all the bad actors in our healthcare system – greedy insurance companies, soul-less CEOs in Big Pharma,profit-hungry “non-profit hospitals”, and all our favorite villains. Mostly, we look at the ways those predators target sick people and poor people for exploitation, but today we’re looking at what happens when they start fighting each other for a bigger piece of the pie? Specifically, we’re going to explore the world of hospital consolidation – that’s when smaller hospitals merge to form bigger corporate entities who can battle it ou ..read more

Just this Monday, we celebrated Martin Luther King Day, a tribute to one of the great leaders of the movement for racial justice – but something that often gets forgotten in the flurry of MLK quotes that become memes this time of year is that equity in healthcare was a crucial part of King’s vision. Throughout his career in activism, he often stated his conviction that “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhuman.” Sadly, over 50 years after his death, racial inequity in healthcare is even more shocking and inhuman. Today, we’re joined by public he ..read more

2023! What a year! Overall, it probably wasn’t the worst year ever: On the positive side, we had Barbenheimer, the Titan Submarine implosion, congressional hearings on UFOs, and all the Taylor Swift gossip you can handle. On the negative side, we had long Covid; the deaths of Matthew Perry, Andre Braugher, and Twitter; war in Gaza , war in Ukraine, and Kanye West is an antisemite now. So yeah… overall it was pretty bad. But what about the very specialized world of American healthcare? How did everyday folks fair when it came to getting the care they needed? In this episode, we’re breaking dow ..read more

It’s that time again folks… time for a Mailbag Episode! We reached out to our whole audience and all our supporters to find the pressing questions on everyone’s mind. Or at least we would have if Gillian hadn’t been too busy eating turkey to email our list. So instead, Gillian reached out personally to some of our superfans (anyone in her contact list who had previously admitted to listening to the show once) to find out what they wanted to hear from us. And here we are, with questions about everything from Ronald Reagan to elder care to dinner table conversation from some of our favorite sta ..read more

Open enrollment. Deductible. Coinsurance. HMO. Indemnity plan. If you’re listening this far, you probably have a migraine already. Understanding the language of the health insurance industry, let alone selecting a health insurance plan, can be confusing, frustrating, and disheartening. But never fear – we are here to give you a crash course on everything you need to know about your insurance plan. No need to scroll through Healthcare.gov’s Health Insurance glossary and risk throwing yourself out the window… We want to give you some tools here to understand what you’re choosing when you pick a ..read more

If you’ve ever had an experience with the American healthcare system, you’ve probably walked away thinking, “Why can’t we have nice things? Or even basic human things??” We get stuck on gurneys sitting in ER hallways, waiting hours for care; we skip other basic needs like food and housing to pay for the healthcare we can’t skip; or we wait for months for preauthorizations from our health insurance and referrals from our doctors. Of course, for the super rich you don’t have to endure any of these humiliating experiences, and they have developed some new, expensive ways to get the healthcare th ..read more

Just over a month ago we lost Bob Barker, the man who taught us all about the brutal nature of capitalism one pricing game at a time. Now, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, the federal government is going to be playing a role in determining the prices for some of our favorite products. No, we’re not talking about cars or family vacations to the Bahamas – we’re talking about the prescription drugs that keep us alive! As the Biden Administration enters its own Showcase Showdown with Big Pharma, we’re taking a full episode to break down what that means and whether the result will be prices ..read more

With all the threats facing our country – climate change, a predatory economy, corporations buying our elections, and the overt move towards fascism among the far right – you would think that politicians would be laser-focused on the existential crises descending upon us. But instead, politicians in the US are devoting a considerable amount of their energy these days to an all-out assault on the rights of transgender people. Although the war on trans people has taken many forms, from bathroom bills to restricting school curricula, one of the most chilling is the denial of basic gender-affirmi ..read more