Bonus: Peek inside our reporter’s notebook. What we’ve learned and where we’re headed, with Sally Herships

 

Dan: Hey there. Now that we’ve wrapped season three of An Arm and a Leg, we’re going to do something a little different. It’s time to take a look back at what we’ve learned and what I’ve learned in making this show. 

 

What are the big, big lessons, including stuff we never actually got to talk about on the show and what are some big projects we’re going to tackle in the next year or two.

 

 So spoiler alert, we are definitely going to keep looking at self-defense and what we can do to help ourselves and help each other fight back and keep from getting crushed by all the weird, screwed up, appalling, confusing ways the healthcare system and the health insurance industry and a bunch of other money making powers that be keep messing with us. I’m telling you, I’m learning a ton every day and every day I have more questions, but I’m not just going to yak at you.

 

That would be weird. Instead, I’m going to do a slightly less weird thing and I’m going to ask one of my favorite colleagues to interview me. You know, before I did the show, I was a reporter for public radio and Sally Herships was a role model and then a mentor and a friend. So a few years ago, I got to work for a national show on public radio called Marketplace. 

 

And Sally Herships was one of the people whose work on that show made me want to work there cause she’s so smart. She’s so funny. She’s so human. She’s super kind. She’s a great storyteller. And so when I got there, she was one of the people who really showed me the ropes and helped me understand how to do that job. And since then she’s done a lot of work for Planet Money, a bunch of other places too.

 

So there’s basically nobody I’d rather talk to about this work. And there’s nobody I feel better about putting in charge for the bulk of this episode. So, hey Sally Herships.

 

Sally Herships: Hey Dan.

 

Dan: Thanks so much for doing this. How are you doing?

 

Sally Herships: Totally, I’m putting on my hosting hat. I’m being you for the day.

 

Dan: Excellent, excellent, excellent. But don’t use my name because that would be confusing. Do you want to do the intro?

 

Sally Herships: Totally. I’m ready. This is, this is an Arm and a Leg a show about the cost of healthcare. I’m Sally Herships Herships.

 

Dan: And I’m Dan Weissmann. Do you have any questions for me?

 

Sally Herships: So I don’t know if I have a question, but I think I have a comment. It’s something that I really appreciate about the show, which is that oftentimes as a reporter, when you’re tasked with doing these stories, you’re most commonly shedding light on a big question that people have. Like, why is healthcare so expensive and confusing? But you don’t really get to the answers. And I love that in this show, you guys get to the answers. And I think especially in the last season, right, you were talking about how people were figuring out how to solve problems on their own.

 

Dan: Thank you. Yeah, man. That’s definitely the intention. We want to find out as much as we can. I mean it, it turns out the answers like, Oh my God, how much time do you have to like, why things are so expensive? I say all the time, I’m never gonna run out of material for this show. But yeah, I mean, we get to actually dig even on a little question like, huh, so those stitches were $3,000 and nobody could tell you upfront how much they would be. Why is that? And like we actually get the time to dig in even on the little question and be like, well what is up with that little thing?  And I should say three thousand dollars is not little for most of us. But I hear all the time about things in the tens of thousands of dollars, the hundreds of thousands, so you know it’s all relative.

 

Sally Herships: So Is that the kind of thing you mostly what you hear from listeners? Like why is my medical bill so expensive? Or are people also writing in about other things too?  

 

Dan: Oh man. I mean I hear so many different kinds of stories and questions and stuff. Like, you know, hundreds of people get in touch every season, like through the website, on social media, on email, on Patreon. And, you know, I kind of want to develop an actual system for them cause there’s just so many stories. There’s like, you know why is my medical bill so expensive? It’s a pain in the ass. Why is my medical bill so expensive? It’s going to crush my family.

 

Dan: I mean, like everything. I tried making categories for them for a little while and they were just too many. I couldn’t, couldn’t make it work.

 

Sally Herships: This is like a bad kind of popularity.

 

Dan: Well, yeah I meant it’s GREAT to be popular, but yeah, it’s terrible for our society, right? You know there’s are a couple of patterns that are kind of interesting. Can I tell you about them?

 

Sally Herships: Yeah, totally.

 

Dan: Okay. So one of them is like people from other countries is kind of a big category. People who are like, Oh man, you people have it rough over there and I cannot look away. 

 

Sally Herships: People from other countries feel bad for us?

 

Dan: Yeah. Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh man. People from other countries feel terrible for us. And some of them are like, I didn’t know how good I had it here. Like that happens to people arriving from other countries who are like, this just makes me so grateful that I don’t live in a country with the kind of system that you have.

 

Sally Herships: So American healthcare making other countries look better. That’s our slogan. 

 

Dan: Making, making people in other countries feel really great. Yeah. That’s us. And then this other one that like maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me but it surprised me and it’s, it’s really huge. And it may be the single biggest category of people that I hear from. It’s people who worked in medicine, like doctors and nurses and physician assistants and physical therapists. So when we did a listener survey at the end of season two, one of the questions. I asked, cause I was curious, I was like, this is a lot of people I asked like, do you work in medicine? Or a related field? 

 

Dan: And like a third of the people said yes.

 

Sally Herships: So wait a minute. You mean people like some of the people who are listening and writing in, they are not just normal sick people. They’re also the healthcare provider. Like the people who are creating the bills and the medical costs are also listening.

 

Dan: Well, yeah, I mean this is the thing, like if you’re a, if you’re a doctor or a nurse or a physician’s assistant or whatever, people don’t feel like they’re in charge. They don’t go into this in order to like make a gazillion dollars. I mean, some people who are doctors make a good living, but they could probably also make a good living like on Wall Street. Right? Getting into medical school was hard. And you know, lots of other people don’t make spectacular salaries as like nurses or physician assistants or whatever. I mean, those are SOLID careers, require serious training and education too, but the people I hear from are like, I want to help people. And they’re saying like, it hurts my heart. You know, that I’m here to help people, but I’m part of a system that’s actually causing them huge problems.

 

Sally Herships: And are they feeling, do they feel frustrated by the system too?

 

Dan: Big time. Yeah. Just a couple weeks ago, I got a note from somebody, she said she’s a nurse midwife and she works for what she calls a — she calls it a quote unquote nonprofit Catholic hospital — and she says like, I’m sure the sisters who started it over a hundred years ago would be furious about how it’s run. And the end of the note is like, if you ever need an insider to tell you how the system also ties the hands of providers, I’m your gal. Keep fighting the good fight.

 

Sally Herships: Wow. 

 

Dan: It’s really heartening, right, in that listener survey, we asked for a lot of like open-ended feedback. And the one thing that stuck with me the most, there were a lot of things, but was another person who wrote, who was a nurse and she was like listening to this show makes me an advocate for change whenever I can, my patients get your information.

 

Sally Herships: Aww, that’s kind of great. That’s amazing.

 

Dan: Yeah. You know, the other super memorable one was this woman who wrote in was like, I recently retired from running a hospital cause it’s not just the doctors and the nurses. It’s like I hear from people who are like, I work in the insurance industry, I’m an administrator. Like nobody feels like they’re actually running things. And this woman had recently retired from running a hospital system, like a whole chain of hospitals. And then her nephew got sick with cancer, really sick, and she was like, I’m your advocate. Don’t pay a single bill until I’ve gone through all of them. And she went through all of them and she found tons of errors and tons of things that just needed to be argued with. And she was like, I know this stuff better than anybody and this is an enormous amount of work for me. And obviously I wanted to do a story with her, but she was like, no, no, I can’t go on tape with you. I was like, why not? She was like, well, where my nephew lives, it’s kind of a small town and the hospital doesn’t see that many people. Like basically she said I think somebody would recognize my voice and they’d be pissed because I’m calling out the ways in which we’re being overcharged and that would affect my nephew’s ongoing care. 

 

Sally Herships: Wow. 

 

Dan: Yeah

 

Sally Herships:So you said there were a couple of different really interesting categories of people who write in. So we’ve heard about health care providers, which is a big surprise to me or would be a big surprise except I’ve heard the show. What is the other category?

 

Dan: Well the other one I was thinking of, it’s this one that makes me super, super happy. It’s when people say they’re using the information they get from the show. So at the end of this season I actually asked people to write in with the subject line I learned and one person wrote in —  Sarah from Chicago — and she said from listening to this podcast I learned that I should not just roll over when a bill arrives that I think is wrong. And then she had this story, she got like a $1,500 bill for like a simple blood test. And there was a whole thing like her insurance didn’t want to pay anything. It was out of network. She was going to be on the hook for $1,500 for this blood test. And then she writes, here’s where being a listener of this podcast changed things. I said, no, this is unfair. I’m not paying this bill. So what is the next step for me to appeal this? 

 

Sally Herships: What is the next step for me to become Sarah? That’s amazing.

 

Dan: Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure. And then she says four months, four months, and several phone calls later, the charges were completely dropped and we paid nothing.

 

Sally Herships: Hmm. That’s, I mean that’s, it’s amazing, but it’s sort of said Wow. Four months is a lot of time.

 

Dan: Yeah, well she had like several phone calls. It’s not like she was like making a full time job of being on the phone for four months. But you’re kind of living with it for four months. you don’t like make one phone call and get it fixed. You gotta be a real grown up about it. So yeah, like how do I become, Sarah is actually like kind of a good question for a lot of us. 

 

Sally Herships: So wait, are people going out and doing stuff like that often? Is that a thing?

 

Dan: I mean I don’t know how often, but I’m hearing about it a lot and, and the next step that I’m hearing about is the one that makes me even more excited. It’s where people are going out and sharing what they’ve learned, like spreading the word. So like, like right after we published our last episode, a woman from California named Emily F. Peters posted a thread to Twitter and it was like, come on a journey of rage with me, Twitter. I’m researching the fair prices for my appendectomy surgery to dispute my bill.

 

She had gotten an appendectomy when she was out of town. So all the charges were out of network. They added up to more than $61,000 and the good news was her insurance paid like $54,000 yeah she’s like, that is way more than fair. And then the hospital’s like, so Emily, about the other $7,000 in change, when are we going to get that from you? She’s demanded the itemized bill and then she started looking up the going rates for the area where the hospital was and she found these like giant Whoppers, like there’s an abdominal CT scan. She found the going rate for that scan in that area is $279 her bill showed a charge for $6,662.

 

Sally Herships: Wait a minute? That’s like a huge percentage difference.That’s basically like three hundred bucks. 

 

Dan: Yeah I’m not doing the ma- It’s like 20 times. Like 2000% yeah. I mean there’s another one. She was like, Oh here’s a basic blood test. The going rate is 55 bucks. On her bill, It’s more than a thousand dollars 

 

Sally Herships: Oh my God. 

 

Dan: Yeah. And she’s like, I’m fighting all of these and in the middle of this whole thread, she like links to our episode where she learned this and she’s like, “Thanks, @armandalegshow for teaching me how to do this.” We did our episode called Can They Freaking Do That? Like we went through all these steps and I was like in the middle of that episode I was like, you might want to get a pencil here. And like you know she did.

 

Sally Herships: You should give out licenses. Have you considered that?

 

Dan: Yes. We’ll get to that. Yeah. I think this is kind of where, where things want to go from here is like how do we make this into kind of a community education project, right?

 

Sally Herships: How do you make it into a community education project, Dan?

 

Dan: Ha!  I don’t know man. I mean I’ve got the beginning of some ideas and we’re going to talk about them right after this break. 

 

This season of An Arm and a Leg is a co-production of Public Road Productions and Kaiser Health News, that’s a non-profit newsroom that covers health care in America. Kaiser Health News is NOT affiliated with the giant health care provider Kaiser Permanente. We’ll have a little more on Kaiser Health News at the end of this episode.

 

So, Sally, you were asking how do we turn this into a community education project?  I’m like I 

don’t completely know yet, but can I tell you this one other story?

 

Sally Herships: Yeah, please.

 

Dan: It’s kind of like this is how we make it into a community education project is people are educating me. Like I have to learn how to like here’s what people are teaching me. So like, that same week, also on Twitter, someone pointed me to this incredible lesson. This woman posted to Twitter about how she had used advice she found on tick tock to get an emergency room bill reduced, like from a thousand dollars to $0 dollars.

 

Sally Herships: Wait a minute and tick tock tick tock just cause I’m old —

 

Dan: Oh, me too. Me too. Tick Tock is this – all the young’s are doing. It’s another social, video platform. It’s like Instagram maybe, but everything’s a one minute video. 

 

Sally Herships: Oh.

 

Dan: And like the major like thing that it’s known for is like you can take, sound often music that somebody else has put up there and use it to make your own videos. So it’s like, someone posted their music video and you’re like, here’s my video of me doing a thing to that music. But people also just use it like one minute videos. And so this woman named Shauna Burns was posting videos about defending yourself from crazy medical bills. And so here’s, here’s the one that I got pointed to on Twitter. Here’s a little bit of it about emergency room bills.

 

Shaunna Burns: You get a bill for $1,000 the very first thing you do: say, “I want an itemized bill with every single charge.” 

 

Now what they’re going to do on the back end of that — because they don’t want you to know that they’ve charged you $37 for a fucking bandaid — They’re going to take that $37 charge right off of there before they send you the itemized statement. 

 

Any of those stupid charges, they’re going to take them right off. And all you have to do is ask for an itemized bill with every charge and they’re going to take those charges off — because they don’t want you to know that they’re charging you $37 for a fucking bandaid. And guess what? That’s how much they charge for a fucking bandaid. So when you actually can say, you charged me $37 for a bandaid, they don ‘t like that.

 

Sally Herships: Wait a second, wait a second. I mean what she’s doing is amazing, but I just have to ask, do hot. Yeah. Do, do people actually get cha, like do hospitals and doctors actually charge $37 per bandaid? Does that happen?

 

Dan: Yeah. Yeah, it totally happens. I mean, I don’t know. I should say like I’m a journalist. That totally happens. Like, cause I’m not looking at an actual emergency room bill right now that I fact checked. But yeah, I mean Sarah Cliff, who’s now the New York Times in her last job at Vox, did a whole year and change worth of investigating emergency room bills. She had people send her ER bills and the whole thing started when she got a, a note from somebody who was like, I went to the emergency room with my kid who had a cut on their finger, but it was late at night and it was bleeding a lot.

 

Dan: And the bill was like 600 and some dollars. And what they did was they put a bandaid on her finger. 

 

Sally Herships: Oh my God. 

 

Dan: In that case the actual bandaid charge, cause that was separated out was you know, only $7. But I mean, yeah.

 

Sally Herships: And this why people are going to tick talk to like talk about how to fight these charges I guess. 

 

Dan: Uh, yeah. And, this is what we’re up against. So when I saw that I was like, I guess I have to download, tick-tock on my phone. This woman Shauna Burns is still the only person I follow on ticktock. Cause I mean, I’m old. I’m not going to get involved in this any more than I really have to, but she’s amazing. She had like nine or 10 videos about fighting medical bills and debt collectors. And she had actually worked as a debt collector for a few years. So she really knew a lot of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And she, and like she has a daughter who’s had some complex medical stuff where the billing stuff got very complicated. And so she also has a lot of experience kind of fighting back as a consumer. So they’re super good. But like, you know, fine. This is like the ticktock thing, like finding them took a lot of work because she’s a super prolific tic tok-er.

 

Dan: So like I learned about her at the end of December and she had posted these videos like three, four weeks earlier about medical bills and in the meantime she’d posted it. It was like hundreds of tic-tocks. 

 

Sally Herships: That is like a fascinating Tick Tock story that you found. What is maybe a message that someone sent you that has stuck with you in a similar way?

 

Dan: Well here’s one that I don’t know how i’m going to use yet, this was like the most surprising that I got. I got a message last spring from a woman who said she had just left a high ranking job in the Trump administration doing health policy stuff and she loves the show and she had a lot to say. And so like I called her and we talked and she was for real. 

 

And she was, she was really good. Like she gave me some really good tips on stuff to check out that checked out. She had a super interesting perspective and I really liked her. And I told her, I was like, look, you may have noticed I haven’t had people on the show who do like high level political and policy stuff cause uh, you might have noticed we’re in a country where things get super divisive really, really fast.

 

She was like, I totally get it. So, um, but I was like, I have some ideas about how I might like be able to bring you into a conversation cause I think it would be super interesting, and she was like, okay. Um, so I’m, I’m actually kind of working on that now. 

 

Sally Herships: Wow. 

 

Dan: I don’t know. I don’t know how it’s gonna work out, but that’s like wish list.

 

Sally Herships:For next season? 

 

Dan: Like as soon as I can make it happen. Yeah for sure.

 

Sally Herships:And I guess before we get to next season, do you have any updates on people we learned about this season?

 

Dan: Yeah, a couple. So there’s like Wendy Thomas, the reporter in Memphis who got the biggest hospital in town to stop suing patients. When we talked she was still just going on like a rough, like literally like back of the envelope estimate of like, so they, this hospital dropped thousands of lawsuits. How many dollars did that represent? And so since then she’s actually been able to do the math, like she, like she had some colleagues like go download thousands and thousands of court records and figure out the numbers in them. And it was like almost $12 million dollars. 

 

Sally Herships: Wow. 

 

Dan: Yeah.

 

Sally Herships: That’s not an insignificant sum. 

 

Dan: It’s pretty good, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it’s like a pretty good return on your investment for journalism, I would say. 

 

Sally Herships: Yeah.

 

Dan: So that was pretty good. And then there’s the family in Cincinnati with the softball tournament and they were raising money from the local community to erase like $1 million in medical debt and they raised the money they thought it would take.

 

So I heard from them just recently, they were like, hey, we heard back from the group RIP medical debts that kind of facilitates all the financial magic that makes that happen. And the statement we got from them says, the money we raised didn’t wipe out $1 million worth of medical debt. It wiped out $7 million worth of medical debt. 

 

Sally Herships: Wow. 

 

Dan: Yeah, yeah. I was like, uh how? They were like, yeah, we’re curious too. So they’re, they’re trying to figure it out too, but I thought that was, you know, that was pretty cool. Also  I guess this is a little bit of a plug, but we, we, we profiled this comedy group that does like a musical about the history of healthcare and health insurance and they are remounting their show in New York like once a month, in February and March and April now I think in May.

 

So, I’ll put the dates in the newsletter and anybody who’s in New York wants to check it out, can go check it out.

 

Sally Herships: Okay. So those were people from last season, people you spoke to. Like did anything get left on the cutting room floor that you wish you could have used but didn’t? 

 

Dan: There were a couple of things that like, we’re on tape that I wished I could have used. And one of them was, there’s this great bit from Meredith Baylow. She’s the woman we profiled early in the season. We called her a medical bill Ninja. And so there was this story from early in her Ninja career, her kind of Ninja education, where she needed a blood test and her doctor was like, you need this blood test, but I got to tell you the lab work, you run it through my office, it’s going to cost you like 400 bucks and you can maybe get a better deal someplace else. So, she like made all these phone calls and she ended up calling actual labs, to get like the wholesale price and they were like oh yeah well what’s the procedure code?

 

Dan: And she’s like? 

 

Sally Herships: What is the procedure code? 

 

Dan: Well, yeah. And here I’m like, Oh yeah, I should have that written down. But there’s all these medical coding where it’s like, I need a blood test. Well is it blood test? 5475A or blood test, 54 75B where we run this different process on it, right?

 

And they all, as far as I understand it they allow one like providers to talk to each other. So they are talking about the same thing. And they also figure into billing, right? So then for any given code, you bill insurance and you’re like, we did this. It’s this code.

 

Dan: So these codes are like what’s behind the curtain with the way these people all talk to each other.

 

Sally Herships: Cool.

 

Dan: So she needed that and she was like, between you and me, she was like, what’s the procedure code? And she and she needed to figure out how she would get one for this thing. And she knew she could call the doctor’s office and ask, but she felt very shy because here we are.

This is like you just kind of feel like you’re exposing what you don’t know. But she didn’t let that stop her. She got creative. She kind of let them think she was a provider.

 

Meredith: I said, “Oh hey, I have a patient, who we’re looking, she needs this. Can you send me this?” I, I just, you know.

 

Dan: You’re just a voice on the phone….

 

Meredith: … I’m just a voice on the phone.

 

Dan: … from a doctor’s…

 

Meredith: Yeah, I was like, I just, I, we are, “I need you to send over her scripts that you can, I can get the exact billing code that she wanted.”

 

I was like, maybe if I sound like an authority, they’ll just give it to me

 

Dan: Well that was really genius though. You intuited, you believed, you felt like if you just called and said, “hi, I’m a patient, I wonder how much does this cost,” they might have blown you off, so…

 

Meredith: Yeah I really thought they would. And they do.

 

Dan: Yeah and so you, I mean I think this is a really good Ninja move, right? You are like, you’re like, “I have a patient who…”

 

Meredith: …and I am the patient!

 

Dan: Right, right. 

 

Meredith: I do have a patient who …

 

Dan: She got the test for 91 dollars.

 

Sally Herships: Amazing.

 

Dan: Yeah.

 

Sally Herships: So, so you said you had a couple of pieces of tape that you didn’t get to use. Was there another one?

 

Dan: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The one wasn’t exactly from an interview. It was like a conversation at the end of an interview. We did this story in the middle of the season It was Can They Freaking Do That where this woman got a bill for 35 bucks and then they wanted to charge her 1300 if she didn’t pay right away. And so I was running around trying to figure out like, is that legal? Can I freaking do that and is there a way to fight it? And the person with the best answer was this law professor at the University of Arizona, his name is Christopher Robertson. He was like, yeah, you can fight it. And he had like the best line. This is what he said.

 

Christopher Robertson: That’s like shooting fish in a barrel from a contracts-law perspective.

 

Dan: And at the end of our conversation as I was thanking him for taking the time to talk and stuff, he asked me a question,

 

Christopher Robertson: Have you already thought about doing sort of a practical handbook about how to fight your medical bills?

 

Dan: Why do you ask?

 

Christopher Robertson: Because I’m realizing there’s a gap between the sort of policy analysis and the more practical like, okay, here’s the letter. Here’s the words, here’s the phone numbers. Here is the…

 

Dan: Yeah. Almost like a step by step and I can imagine that being, again like you said at least until the cavalry arrives. Yeah.

 

Christopher Robertson: That’s sort of more a handbook sort of approach might be helpful to people. It might sell.

 

Dan: Yes! Yes! Yes! I’d be super interested in that.

 

Christopher Robertson: Ok, well let’s let that percolate in the back of our heads for a few weeks.

 

Dan: Yeah, so that has been percolating, like I have been thinking about that and, and, and, and I’ve talked more with him about it and with some other people too. It’s a super interesting idea.

 

Sally Herships: Dan, are you going to write a book? You should write a book! Are you going to write a book?

 

Dan: You know, if we’re going to like be a big community education project, we should have like a handbook, right? Something you take with you. This could take a little while, but this is kind of this other part of this self-defense. Like we profiled Meredith, she’s like the healthcare Ninja. So the question is like, yeah, how do we build a dojo, right?

 

Sally Herships: Well, I don’t know how to build a dojo, but I do know that if anyone out there listening is a book agent or a publisher, you should hit Dan up. You should get in touch with Dan Weisman, make him your author.

 

Dan: That would be cool. But building the dojo is the big project. And I’ve been thinking a lot like I’ve kinda been building the dojo is this idea that I’ve been now talking about. Can I tell you how I think about it? 

 

Sally Herships: Sure!

 

Dan: I’ve been thinking about this a lot. It’s like the thing about a dojo is like you don’t just go there to learn how to punch and kick and throw. 

 

That’s not actually what the dojo is for. The dojo is there so you can learn how to be kind of an effective citizen. Like, number one:  You’re NOT looking for a fight. You’re looking for ways to be effective. Like how to negotiate and communicate— like that includes techniques for being patient, and being calm, and knowing the right words to use.  And THEN if there IS a fight, there’s got to be a fight, knowing your absolute best options, including how to throw your best punch if you need to. And like being an effective citizen means being effective on behalf of other people too, right?  Cause you don’t know when some bad thing may be coming for someone that you’re around and that you are about. You’re there. And this is, this is this other thing about a dojo is that like as you learn more, you know, you are like advance in rank and that also means that you’re taking on responsibility for teaching and mentoring other people.

 

Sally Herships: Got it. Okay. So it’s like learning the skills, having the map already, but also helping to spread them to educate the community.

 

Dan: Yeah and having them ready to put at the service of anybody who needs them. Right? So, I dunno, I mean it’s kind of a big idea.

 

Dan: I haven’t built a dojo before. I’m not like, I haven’t actually, like I kind of went to this really great dojo for a little while and I was like, this is too much work. I cannot do this. So my experience is limited. Um, but I really liked it and I think it would be cool so maybe I should call those people up and tell them like, I still don’t know if I can do karate the way you do it, but like I really want to learn how to do things the way that you do them.

 

Sally Herships: So what, so what are you gonna do next? Like what are the next steps?

 

Dan: Well we’re going to make more episodes of this podcast. We’re going to release some in a few months and then more later in the year. And in the meantime I wanna like I was kinda saying before, I want to really use these other tools that we have to keep this conversation going.

 

You know, we’re on social media. I’ll give a little plug we’re on Twitter and Instagram at @armandalegshow. We’re on Facebook, that’s like facebook.com/arm and a leg show. So we’re there. The thing that I like want to use the most is our newsletter cause the newsletter goes directly to your inbox. Like I follow a lot of things on social media and like I assume that I’m missing 99% of what anybody I follow posts on social media and I’m okay with it. So I  wanna like use our website and the newsletter to like have a place where we’re able to kind of, where I’m able to share what I’m learning and share what people are sending in and keep this conversation going kinda between seasons. So here’s where I give the address to actually SIGN UP for the newsletter:  It’s arm-and-a-leg-show dot com, slash, newsletter.  Arm and a leg show dot com, slash, newsletter.  And you can see all of the awesome tiktok videos from Shaunna Burns, and you can sign up there and stay with this conversation So that’s the big thing. 

 

Sally Herships: Cool. 

 

Dan: Yeah, there is this, there’s this other thing, uh, that is a bit of a next step that’s kind of celebrating the community we’re already starting to build. Can I give this little spiel 

 

Sally Herships: Yeah please?

 

Dan: So we’re about to hit 500 supporters on Patreon. This is a goal I set at the beginning of the season. We are like just about there and I’ve been promising that we’ll celebrate and that is happening. So Sean O’Neil who designed our logo is making these three super cool things for everybody who signs up, who’s part of this first 500 person cohort. So first there’s arm and a leg bandaids and there’s a version of this that I already send out to people who give $20 a month or more and I’ll keep doing that. And those are like refrigerator magnets which are awesome. You can display them on your fridge forever, but these bandaids Sean is making they’re stickers you can print yourself at home cause I mean Sally Herships, the postage on 500 packages of stickers would kill us.

 

And me taking like it would take me like a week to stuff 500 envelopes and I should probably be doing other things like make the show. But so Sean and I are working on it so you can print them on to address labels. I just ordered myself a package from Amazon for like three bucks delivered. You can get a packet with like 10 sheets, 32 sheets, 300 stickers. So that’s one arm and leg, bandaids. Second, another big print-it-yourself sticker, like big round stickers. Again, I’ve ordered these for a few dollars. You can get dozens of blanks that go into your printer. And so, when we put all this stuff out, I’ll include links to like where you can get these things for cheap.

 

Dan: And then, but my favorite part, and this is kinda something you were talking about before, like membership cards, 

 

Sally Herships: Oh become an Arm and a Leg member. Licensing! Yeah.

 

Dan: This is your certificate, right? So, if you’re part of this first cohort, you get this one time thing. It’s a for now it’s a membership card in the arm and a leg ass kicking league for self defense and mutual aid against the awful costs of healthcare. 

 

Sally Herships: I want it. Sign me up. I want to join. 

 

Dan: Yeah? Okay. All right. All right. Uh, it’s a patreon.com/arm and a leg show or you go to arm and leg show.com/support for the link to that. Yeah, yeah. It will entitle the bearer to all the rights and privileges of membership and certifies, you’re with us. And this is the one time part cause I think eventually everybody should get this, but this one says, you know, you’re a charter member, like class of February, 2020.

 

Sally Herships: Amazing. 

 

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. So anybody who signs up before March 1st, 2020 gets this and this means you’re, there laying the foundation for our dojo, whatever a dojo actually looks like. That’s it man. Sally Herships we’ve come. I gotta go do that. I gotta go make the show. I gotta go write the next newsletter I got to do these things ah we’re going to put this out. Um, thank you so much for doing this. Thanks for interviewing me on my show, which is a weird thing for us to do, but I’m really happy that we did it.

 

Sally Herships: Thanks for having me. Do I have to, do I have to give back the show now?

 

Dan: Well, eventually. Do you wanna do you wanna do you want to do the credits?

 

Sally Herships:I’ll do the credits.

 

Dan: This is an Arm and a Leg. A show about the cost of health care. Our host for this episode has been Sally Herships Herships,

 

Sally Herships: And this episode was produced by Dan Weisman. The editor is Anne Hepperman. The consulting managing producer is Daisy Rosario, music by Dave Winer and blue dot sessions. Adam Raymonda is the audio wizard. This season of an arm and a leg is a co-production with Kaiser Health News, a non-profit news service about healthcare in America that’s an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation. 

 

Dan: All right, cool. I’ll take it back here. 

 

Kaiser Health News is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. That’s the big healthcare provider. The two groups share an ancestor. That’s it. It’s this guy Henry J Kaiser. He had his hands in a lot of different stuff and it’s kind of a fun story. You can check it out at arm and a leg show dot com slash Kaiser. Diane Webber is national editor for broadcast. Tauyna English is senior editor for broadcast innovation at Kaiser Health News. They’re editorial liaisons to the show. They’re kind and they’re smart. Our special guest host for this episode is 

Sally Herships Herships. Sally Herships, thank you so much for doing this with me.

 

Sally Herships: Thank you.

 

Dan: One last thing we’re gonna do. I’m gonna thank our newest supporters on Patreon and there’s a bunch of 

them. 

 

Dan: In fact, we’re going to say thank you to the following 74 people who joined us as patrons in the last few weeks— in amounts that range from two bucks a month to a HUNDRED dollars a month. Thank you so much. We have come a long, long way, thanks to YOU and we are going to have an amazing year. So thank you to…