Is it possible for a health care company to make enough people mad about their billing practices that it hurts their business? For one genetic testing company, maybe so.Īn Arm and a Leg listener Jessica got a test that’s become routine in early pregnancy: non-invasive prenatal testing. Here’s a transcript of the episode.Send your stories and questions: or call 724 ARM-N-LEGAnd of course we’d love for you to support this show. We listen-in on one of Dollar For’s real-life negotiations with a debt collector and take notes. So Dollar For is trying something new: what they’re calling a “negotiation lab” for gaming out the best way to negotiate with hospitals and debt collectors. They say their work to date has helped erase more than $18 million in medical debt.īut lots of people who can’t afford their medical bills don’t qualify for charity care. Dollar For also started holding open trainings on Zoom, teaching people the ins and outs of applying for charity care-and helping others to do so.
Next, a group of whip-smart volunteers helped Dollar For develop a user-friendly system to help folks apply for that assistance. The folks at Dollar For caught our attention - and lots of other people’s-when they went super-viral on TikTok with a 60-second recipe for crushing medical debt by accessing charity care, financial assistance that most US hospitals are legally required to offer. It sounds hard - and it can be - but what if we got it down to a science? Mapped out all the moves ahead of time? Jared Walker and his team at the nonprofit Dollar For are running a big experiment to see if they can do just that. It’s often possible to negotiate medical bills. Send your stories and questions: or call 724 ARM-N-LEGGet our newsletters here. And of course we’d love for you to support this show. Īlso, we mention our recent coverage of the legal and lobbying power of the pharmaceutical industry. We unpacked their role, their power, and the profits they make when drug prices are high, in this 2019 episode: … and here’s a deep dive on the devious, clever games among PBMs, pharma companies, and insurance companies - games where we, people who need medicine, always lose. Here’s that story- a version we ran in 2021, including updates on what citizen-scientists, hackers, and activists are up to: of the biggest possible obstacles to California’s plan is the power of middleman companies called pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. How insulin got so horribly expensive was one of the first stories we covered on this show. We look at how California’s plan came to be, and what might stand in the state’s way.
The price of insulin could be the starkest example of our out-of-control health care system: More than 7 million Americans need it to survive, and some die because they can’t afford it- medicine that’s been around for 100 years, medicine its discoverers didn’t want to patent. How’s it going to work? (Is it going to work?) This year, the state of California put up $100 million to produce its own insulin, and sell it for cheap.
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