Some more things that didn’t suck in 2025

Dan: Hey there–

It has been a long year, and yes, 2026 is shaping up to be a doozy.

As I record this, it’s looking like any hope that Congress will extend certain     Obamacare subsidies for next year are looking like a long shot. Experts say millions of people could lose insurance coverage.

And– not to rub it in– but the federal government actually backtracked this year on another issue we’ve talked about here: Keeping medical debts off of people’s credit reports.

The Biden administration spent years crafting a rule to establish that protection.

The Trump administration has actually said recently: those protections are ILLEGAL.

But states have been enacting laws of their own this year … which means lots of people are still protected. 

And this is where we pick up a series we started a few weeks ago — looking at things that DID NOT SUCK in 2025.

Cuz not only did some states fill in holes left by the feds .Other states were staking out new ground. 

For example, a new law in Oregon goes hard at a core reason why health care keeps costing more all the time: 

Big corporations and investors keep gobbling up more and more medical practices— jacking up prices and  (at least sometimes) delivering significantly crummier care.

Oregon’s new law aims to slam the brakes on that.

In fact, lots of states have done lots of things that did not suck this year.

A few weeks ago, we looked at state laws that push back against some ways insurance companies delay and deny care. 

And new state laws that protect people from getting their homes and their paychecks taken away because of medical debt.

Laws like these passed in lots of states — red states, blue states, purple states. With bipartisan support.

So did laws restricting middleman companies like pharmacy benefit managers from jacking up what people pay for drugs. And laws restricting price-gouging by hospitals.

We’re digging into these few examples to look at how laws like this get made– and defended. 

They take a combination of political work and some hard-core nerding out. And when they pass, laws like Oregon’s become models other states can pick up on.

So, let’s go.

This is An Arm and a Leg– a show about why health care costs so freaking much, and what we can maybe do about it. I’m Dan Weissmann, I’m a reporter, and I like a challenge. So the job we’ve chosen here is to take one of the most enraging, terrifying, depressing, parts of American life and bring you a show that’s entertaining, empowering, and useful.

Of the half-dozen states that passed laws to keep medical debts from dinging people’s credit, most of them look “blue” on a political map: New Jersey, Rhode Island, California.

But Maine is a little more purple. And Maine’s law passed unanimously.

Here’s State senator Donna Bailey, who sponsored it.

Donna Bailey: I don’t remember a lot of heavy pushback, which was pleasantly surprising to me, quite honestly.

Dan: Surprising because it’s not like just saying “let’s help people with medical debts” guarantees success in Maine. 

Donna Bailey: We did have a bill last session that did not go through and did not have bipartisan support.

Dan: Donna Bailey had sponsored that one too. This time, she was determined to win. When she campaigned for re-election, she promised to go for it. She says her previous bill had been more complicated. This one had a single focus. 

And when it came up in committee, her colleagues heard some compelling testimonies.

Patty Kidder: We pay our mortgage on time every month. But because of unpaid medical bills, we were unable to just go buy a new or used car when the engine blew in our only working vehicle…

Andrea Steward: I began accumulating my own medical debt at 17 when I discovered, which I only discovered on my credit report, when I was trying to purchase my first home in 2022…

Dan: But legislators also heard hard numbers. Fresh numbers, released that very day

From a survey showing that almost half of Mainers were carrying medical debt.

A lot of them wound up with dings on their credit because of it. Which meant — as they said in the survey — medical debt on credit reports was causing them real problems.

Ann Woloson: It’s affecting their ability to get jobs. It’s affecting their ability to buy a car. It’s affecting their ability to rent an apartment. Something needs to be done about it.

Dan: That’s the person who commissioned the survey.

Ann Woloson: I’m Anne Woloson and I’m executive director for Consumers for Affordable Healthcare, a nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy organization based in Maine.

Dan: How long has the organization been around?

Ann Woloson: We’re gonna be celebrating our 40th anniversary next year.

Dan: Wow. And you haven’t solved the problem of affordable healthcare in 40 years.

Ann Woloson: Nope. Unfortunately. I guess I’m not doing a very good job. Right.

Dan: Well, there might be some countervailing forces.

Dan: Hearing the story behind this bill, I don’t think Ann Woloson is bad at her job.

For years, she’s convened a strategy meeting on Thursday mornings at 9am. Consumer advocates, health care advocates. 

Ann Woloson: We used to meet at the State House pre pandemic, but now we meet over, we meet over Zoom slash telephone. However. Whatever’s easy. Sometimes people are in their car.

Dan: She says in fall 2024, the group started looking ahead to the next legislative session. 

Ann Woloson: We were starting to talk about like what more can we do with medical debt? And somebody probably said, well, I’ve been talking to Senator Bailey and she’s interested in submitting a bill to address the reporting of medical debt to creditors. And we’re all like, oh, that sounds like a great idea. That’s something we can get behind. 

Dan: Ann Woloson found some money in her budget to run a survey — like twelve thousand dollars.

Ann Woloson: Which maybe doesn’t sound like a lot, but for a small nonprofit, that’s a, that’s a lot of money.

Dan: I don’t have it in my pocket. Right? It’s money.

Dan: Ann Woloson says: this was a strategic investment.

Ann Woloson: We will frequently hear from industry representatives that such and such. This is not really a problem. I don’t know where this is coming from.

Dan: And they dismiss individual testimony as a few isolated hard-luck stories.

Ann Woloson: Well, here we have this survey that shows, yeah, medical debt is a problem. So it’s not just something that we’re pulling out and saying is a problem.

Dan: Nobody voted against the bill. Not in committee. Not on the Senate floor, not in the House. It was a better return on investment than Ann Woloson had hoped for. 

Ann Woloson: So there was, I would say, almost a unanimous feeling out there that something needed to be done about this. I wasn’t really expecting that.

Dan: State Senator Donna Bailey says she thinks — along with the survey — the Biden administration’s push on the issue helped. Partly because it raised the issue’s profile.

And partly because the actual rule– finalized just before Biden left office — may have left opponents thinking the stakes were lower. 

Donna Bailey: Some politicians who may have been opposed, were just like, well, it doesn’t matter if we pass something on the state level. It’s already, you know, forbidden at the federal level, so going to put their energies elsewhere.

Dan: On the other hand, advocates like Ann Woloson were looking at something else: The 2024 election results. Joe Biden may have pushed through this rule before leaving office, but he was still… leaving office. 

Ann Woloson: It was in the back of my mind and probably several other people’s minds, that were working on this um, that we needed to codify something in Maine in case something changed at the, at the federal level. 

Dan: Which of course, something did. Within weeks of taking office, the Trump administration effectively shuttered the agency behind the rule: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

By that time, the collections industry had already sued to invalidate Biden’s medical-debt rule.

The Trump administration ?didn’t do much to fight that lawsuit, and over the summer a federal judge found the rule illegal. Donna Bailey and her allies were definitely watching. 

Donna Bailey: We’re like, wow. You know, thank goodness we put something in law at the state level.

Dan: But there was a new potential threat. The judge who zapped the federal rule went farther.

In his ruling, he wrote that not only did the Biden rule violate a law called the Fair Credit Reporting Act– but that same federal law would pre-empt state laws like Maine’s, and nullify them.

Then, a few months later, in October, Trump’s CFPB issued its own legal opinion — basically elaborating on the judge’s reasoning, arguing that, yep: State laws like Maine’s should be tossed.

Which definitely sounds like it sucks.

But here’s where things get good and nerdy.

I don’t think anybody’s been pushing on this issue of medical debts and credit reports longer — or nerding out harder — than Chi Chi Wu. She’s an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center. You’ve heard from her before on this show.

She’s not thrilled about the judge’s ruling, but she says it did not suck as much as news reports at the time suggested. 

Chi Chi Wu: The judge did not quote, unquote, rule that state laws were preempted. 

Dan: She uses a nerdy legal word to describe the judge’s statement about pre-emption: Dicta. Meaning, if I’ve got this right, just talking. Not actually making law on this issue of pre-empting state measures.

Chi Chi Wu: It wasn’t central to the ruling. It wasn’t briefed. He didn’t do any analysis. I mean, preemption under the Fair Credit Reporting Act is really complicated. A little bit head spinning. There’s some case law out there and he didn’t consider any of it because frankly the issue wasn’t really before him. So, that’s the part that didn’t suck as bad as you might think.

Dan: Basically, Chi Chi Wu says, to get rid of those state laws, plaintiffs would have to challenge them in court, one at a time. For the record, she thinks the arguments against those laws are weak.

Chi Chi Wu: But they push it. I mean, they push it and they see if a court will buy their arguments. They often push theories that aren’t supported even by the text of the statute. And sometimes they get away with it, unfortunately. I mean, they have very expensive lawyers that, you know, this is how they earn their big bucks by pushing the law as much as they can in favor of their clients.

Dan: I actually talked with one of those high-priced lawyers recently. Who was not ready to claim victory– or accept defeat in advance. She was like, “These things have to be litigated.”

Which of course has started. Actually, in Maine. 

But Donna Bailey says — based on early proceedings in that case– she’s not worried: 

Donna Bailey: The interesting part was that the court did not put any stay on the legislation, so it was still allowed to go into effect.

Dan: That is, the court hasn’t granted a preliminary injunction, which would have prevented Maine from enforcing the law while the case plays out. Which will take … a while.

And if courts do eventually rule against states like Maine, Chi Chi Wu has legislative tweaks to suggest that could make state laws more lawsuit-proof. 

If you want to nerd out, we’ll have links in our First Aid Kit newsletter.

But now, we’ll look at a state that came out swinging this year in a big new fight:

Oregon passed a law to prevent big corporations and investors from taking over medical clinics and basically strip-mining them for profits.

That’s next. 

This episode of An Arm and a Leg is produced in partnership with KFF Health News. That’s a nonprofit newsroom covering health issues in America. These folks are amazing journalists. Their reporting wins all kinds of awards every year. We are honored to work with them.

Dan: In the spring of 2024, a news story broke in Oregon that eventually drew national attention. 

News anchor: You called and we listened. We have been getting all kinds of calls and emails from patients who were dropped without any warning. It is our top story tonight. KEZI 9…

Dan: These were patients at Oregon Medical Group, a chain of clinics in the Eugene area. And these patients had just gotten letters in the mail

News reporter: telling them their primary care provider is leaving the medical group and the need to find care somewhere else.

Dan: Other patients only got the news when they called to make an appointment. 

Over the course of a couple years, more than thirty doctors had quit Oregon Medical Group — and left thousands of patients stranded.

A doctor at one area hospital told a local news outlet more and more Oregon Medical Group patients were starting to show up at the ER. 

Some of them just needed refills on prescriptions, since that their regular doctors were gone. Not fired, it turned out. Quit. 

Ben Bowman: Those doctors left because they didn’t agree with the way the practice was being run. This wasn’t what they signed up for when they went into medicine.

Dan: That’s Ben Bowman. He’s a democratic state rep from the Portland suburbs. 

He says he’s talked with some of those doctors personally. Others talked with reporters. 

They said they’d quit because the practice changed after a takeover by Optum. That’s a name that may sound familiar. Optum is a giant subsidiary of the even-more-giant UnitedHealth Group. 

We’ve talked about Optum more than once on this show because it’s got tentacles in just about every part of healthcare. 

Including running medical practices. These days more than 10 percent of ALL doctors in the US work for Optum. More than for anyone else by huge margins. 

Optum took over Oregon Medical Group in 2020, and — as doctors later told reporters– it ended up making big changes. Doctors said dictates from Optum had them spending less time with each patient, with more patients to see, and, after Optum cut staff, with a ton more paperwork to grind through themselves. 

To top it off, at least some of them said they got socked with pay cuts.

But quitting their jobs meant truly leaving their patients behind. Their contracts had non-compete clauses, so they couldn’t just see their patients somewhere else nearby.

Ben Bowman: Some of them went to work in other areas. Some of them left the state of Oregon. Some of them were so burned out. They said they’re done with medicine.

Dan: News reports say as many as 10,000 patients got left behind. And here’s why Ben Bowman was talking with those doctors — and why he’s the guy you’re hearing from:

By the time those stories hit the news, Ben Bowman and some allies had already been fighting for more than a year to fix what he and others say is the root cause of what happened in Eugene. 

Which is probably going to sound familiar.

Ben Bowman: Over the last 10 to 15 years, there’s been a rapid acceleration of corporate and private equity ownership over medical clinics. 

Dan: These are businesses that owe it to their investors to put profits first. But health care providers are supposed to put patients first. 

Ben Bowman: Those two things are inherently in conflict sometimes and we get to decide as a state: how are we going to resolve that tension? And in Oregon, we want the answer to be that the doctors are making the decision that’s in the best interest of their patient.

Dan: Ben Bowman’s saying “we get to decide as a state” and here’s what “we in Oregon want the answer to be” because this year he and his allies won a big legislative fight.

He talked about how they did it with this show’s senior producer, Emily Pisacreta. 

Ben Bowman: This is probably a much longer story than you’re asking for, but,

Emily: No, I love it. I love it. It’s great.

Dan: Emily? Really long?

Emily: I promise not too long. It starts with an intellectual puzzle. 

Bowman could see that big corporations and private-equity — PE for short — were taking over more and more medical practices. All over, including Oregon. 

Ben Bowman: Now, here’s where it gets weird. Oregon, like many states, most states, has long had a corporate practice of medicine law on the books.

Emily: …that basically says, to own a medical practice, you have to have a medical license. A corporation or group of investors can’t get one of those. 

Ben Bowman: But at the same time, we’re seeing this rapid increase in corporations and PE firms buying clinics. How is that possible if we have a law that says you can’t do that?

Emily: In 2023, Bowman read an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that seemed to offer some answers — and maybe a blueprint for building stronger guardrails. 

One of its authors is Erin Fuse Brown. 

Erin Fuse Brown: …and I am a Professor of Health Services, Policy, and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health.

Emily: I met Erin back in 2022, when we looked at how private equity firms were buying up gastroenterology practices and raising the prices on colonoscopies. One investor was calling it ‘The Golden Age of Older Rectums.”

Dan: I still love that you found that quote. And Erin helped us with your next story about private equity. Where ER doctors in California were suing to kick a private-equity backed company out of emergency rooms there. 

Emily: The big issue in that case: California’s corporate practice of medicine law. Erin’s a lawyer by training. She was already chewing on this question 

Erin Fuse Brown: We have all these laws in the books. Well, why doesn’t the corporate practice of medicine prevent this?

Emily: And what I love is: That case in California helped her start to crack that question. 

Because she knew that the answers– what Erin calls the nitty gritty stuff — that’s all buried in contracts. Contracts she didn’t have access to. 

Erin Fuse Brown: They tend to be confidential. Um, they’re private contracts. It’s very difficult to see them.

Emily: But now those California contracts were evidence in a lawsuit. So she could study them.

Erin Fuse Brown: That litigation allowed us to get a, a sense of how these contracts are structured. 

Emily: And here’s the basic structure.

Erin Fuse Brown: An entity like a hospital or one Medical or Optum, stands up something called a management service organization.

Emily: A management service organization — MSO for short .

The MSO is ostensibly just there to take care of “back office” stuff — like billing or HR or compliance — to make the business run better. Here’s how they end up actually running the show. 

Erin and others call this the “friendly physician model.”

The MSO brings in a figure-head doctor — the friendly physician–  who works for them as an executive. 

Then the MSO fronts this friendly physician money to buy a majority stake in the practice, which puts the friendly physician in charge of the medical side. 

So on the one hand, they’re an OWNER. They own the practice — thanks to money from the corporate MSO.

And on the other hand, they’re an EMPLOYEE — working for the same corporate MSO. 

Which Erin says is a conflict of interest.?

Erin Fuse Brown: The conflict of interest is that they’re taking all of their marching orders from their ultimate boss, who is the MSO, right? They hit their numbers, then their compensation goes up from the MSO. So they’re really sort of like a business manager who happens to have an MD behind name. 

Emily: I think of it as kinda like… the CIA covertly installing its favored leader in a foreign country Except the leader openly, publicly taking a salary from the CIA. Oh, and maybe has maybe never even been to the country.

Erin Fuse Brown: Like the owner– who has an MD, who has a license and is therefore eligible to own the practice – they may live in a different state. They may never have stepped foot in the practice

Emily: And they start changing the way the practice is run in a way that makes the corporate entity the most money. Even if it’s not great for clinicians and patients. 

Erin Fuse Brown: You’re gonna see patients not in, you know, 15 minute appointments. You’re gonna see them in nine minute appointments.

Emily: And she says they ratchet up the pressure to do things like “upcode” — assign diagnoses with higher-priced billing codes. 

Erin Fuse Brown: The MSO can send sort of notices to, it’s like high performing clinicians saying like, congrats, you get a bonus. Or reminders, like, you’re on the bottom of the list, you’re not hitting your targets. We need you to upcode more. Basically make us more money. And if you don’t, then we’re gonna punish you either by giving you worse scheduling times, we’re gonna dock your pay or, you know, or do other things.

Emily: And then… maybe there’s a non-compete, making it harder to leave, like at Oregon Medical Group.

So Erin and a pair of other researchers published that paper that said — and I’m oversimplifying a bit — that if you want a real ban on the corporate practice of medicine — you need take on these MSOs, and this friendly physician set-up.

After Ben Bowman read that paper, he got in touch with Erin and her colleagues, and eventually they sat down to work together. 

Going into the 2024 legislative session, Bowman had the blueprint. And he had allies — like former Oregon governor John Kitzhaber. Who used to be an ER doc himself.

He got co-sponsors from both parties. And they had a powerful coalition of outside supporters. 

Ben Bowman: We had patient advocacy groups, we had labor unions. We had the Oregon Medical Association. We had the Oregon Nurses Association.

Emily: Of course there were opponents.

Ben Bowman: You can imagine the interests who didn’t wanna see this happen, like basically any large corporation, which includes four of the six largest corporations in America…

Emily: Like UnitedHealth Group. Obviously. But also CVS. Amazon. Not to mention dozens of private equity firms you’ve never heard of. 

He says the bill looked like it would pass — but Republicans blocked it with a last-second parliamentary trick. So it didn’t get a vote. That was March, 2024.

Then, a few weeks later, Oregon Medical Group hit the headlines. 

Ben Bowman: You can imagine the feeling in Eugene. Ten thousand people who get this piece of mail saying you don’t have a doctor anymore, including elderly people who were relying on that primary care doctor to fill their prescriptions and to keep them healthy.

Emily: A few months later, a neighborhood group in Eugene hosted a town hall. 

Ben Bowman: It included legislators. It included leadership of the Oregon Medical Group. It included Optum Oregon leadership,

Emily: Yep, Optum Oregon showed up. And handed Ben Bowman and his allies a talking point. 

Ben Bowman: The head of Optum, Oregon said in that, in that town hall, this quote: 

Dr. Phil Capp, Optum Oregon: …the experiment of having physician directed healthcare in this country over the last 50 or 70 years didn’t work. It didn’t work. So we have to try a new way. 

Emily: Bowman says that line helped make the stakes really clear when he brought his bill back in 2025.

Ben Bowman: What is at stake in the corporate practice of medicine debate is do you want your healthcare decisions when you’re in an exam room being made by a doctor? Or do you agree with what Optum’s stated position was? Which is we think somebody else should be making that decision. Not physicians.

Emily: And when the 2025 session started, he had another new advantage: his party tapped him to be majority leader.

Ben Bowman: I think that was really helpful, that this was no longer just like a freshman legislator’s bill. This was the house majority leader saying, this is really important to me and my constituents.

Emily: This time the bill passed by more than two-thirds. The final language has limits. It doesn’t apply to hospitals – which also gobble up tons of medical practices. It doesn’t apply to telehealth providers.  And doesn’t totally ban MSOs. But it makes really clear what MSOs are allowed to do– what kind of decisions they can make. For instance, they can’t limit how long a doctor spends with a patient.

Ben Bowman: a corporate owner, a non-physician, cannot dictate to a doctor “you can only see this patient for 15 minutes.”

Emily: And they can’t make clinicians sign non-compete clauses. Those doctors can fly free if they want. 

And crucially — the new law addresses the conflict of interest in that “friendly physician” figurehead setup. It limits how much control they can have in the medical practice if they’re really working for the MSO.

Erin Fuse Brown says this provision got the most pushback from the industry–– and it’s the one lobbyists are working to prevent in other states.

Erin Fuse Brown: And that’s telling, right? If the industry is most concerned about the dual compensation, dual ownership then that is where the rubber hits the road.

Emily: And based on what she learned from Oregon, she’s put together model legislation for other states. 

Which, Ben Bowman says, is something his opponents were afraid of all along. He says out of state companies sent lobbyists to Oregon to fight his bill.

Dan: Whoa. Emily, thank you so much for that story. I love the idea that companies outside of Oregon are already scared that other states will adopt a version of this law. 

We’ll be watching both of these stories in 2026, and others — including stuff we just didn’t get to. 

I mentioned earlier that states moved to restrict pharmacy b  enefit managers, and to restrict price gouging by hospitals. But I don’t think I mentioned that the most aggressive laws on those topics were from two states that show up bright red on political maps: Arkansas and Indiana. 

We’ve gotta get around to that. 

Meanwhile, it was SO heartening to report these stories. Because that meant meeting advocates and legislators from around the country — folks I’d never heard of before, people I’m so glad to have met, because they’re doing so much smart, dedicated work to make things suck less.

Emily: 100% and I will add that I also got to talk with people in states like Colorado and California who have been doing incredible work to lower drug prices on things like insulin and the rheumatoid-arthritis drug Enbrel. 

Following up on what they’ve accomplished and getting those stories on the show is one of the things I’m especially looking forward to in 2026.

Dan: I am so looking forward to having you do that — and speaking of what you’ll be doing in 2026, Emily, I think we’ve actually saved the best news for last.

Anybody who’s been listening to our show recently knows: Like a lot of people, we’ve been SWEATING health insurance for 2026. 

Emily: I mean, I’ve been sweating bullets. I moved to an Obamacare plan this year, and without the enhanced subsidies that are set to expire, I didn’t know how I was supposed to afford those premiums.

Dan: I’ve been sweating too. Because if that happened: Could you afford to actually keep working here part-time? 

We’ve been exploring an alternative: Could you get insurance through An Arm and a Leg? It would be less expensive, and better insurance. 

But we’d need to increase your hours — from 20 hours a week to 30 or more.

Could An Arm and a Leg afford to do that? I didn’t know.

But I ran some numbers last week — looking especially at the donations people have been making since our fundraising season started in November.

And the answer is: YES. People have been so generous so far, I’m ready to make that commitment. 

Emily: We have the all-time greatest community of listeners.

Dan: Seriously. Don’t get me wrong: The numbers so far do not mean we are ALL SET for 2026. 

So, if you’re listening to this, and you’ve been considering making a gift — PLEASE DO IT. We are counting on you. 

Not only so Emily gets better, more-affordable health insurance. But so WE GET FIFTY PERCENT MORE EMILY.

Now, you’ve just heard Emily’s reporting right here. You’ve been hearing it. You know how amazing her work is.

But you may not know: Emily’s also the reason for a lot of OTHER stuff you’ve noticed. 

Like, we brought back our First Aid Kit newsletter this year, and made it weekly? 

You don’t see Emily’s byline on it– because she’s the EDITOR. You don’t wanna hear all the backstage work — on that project and others — but it’s been huge.

Having fifty percent more of Emily’s time is gonna power SO much new work in 2026. You’re going to absolutely love it.

And we definitely need your help to make it happen. 

To make that gift, just go to arm and a leg show dot com, slash support.

Arm and a leg show dot com, slash support.

You may be asking: Hey, Dan, will my gift be MATCHED? I’ve heard you talk about the NewsMatch campaign from the Institute for Nonprofit News. Is that still in effect?

And the answer is: Maybe, if you act fast. You all gave a lot more in November than we expected — which was AMAZING… and it means we have fewer matching dollars left at this point.There are still SOME — but they’re going fast. If you want your gift doubled, head NOW to arm and a leg show dot com, slash, support.

But no matter what, to make this plan work — fifty percent more Emily — every dollar you give us this month counts more than ever. 

Thank you SO much to everybody who’s already given, who’s allowed us to get here, to make this commitment. 

If you haven’t yet, now’s your time: The place to go is arm and a leg show dot com, slash support.

Thank you SO much! We’ll be back with one more episode before the end of the year.

Till then, take care of yourself.

This episode of An Arm and a Leg was produced by me, Dan Weissmann along with Emily Pisacreta — and edited by Ellen Weiss. 

Adam Raymonda is our audio wizard.

Our music is by Dave Weiner and Blue Dot Sessions. 

Claire Davenport is our engagement producer.

Sarah Ballema is our Operations Manager. Bea Bosco is our consulting director of operations. 

An Arm and a Leg is produced in partnership with KFF Health News. That’s a national newsroom producing in-depth journalism about health issues in America and a core program at KFF, an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism.

 Zach Dyer is senior audio producer at KFF Health News. He’s editorial liaison to this show.

An Arm and a Leg is distributed by KUOW, Seattle’s NPR news station.

And thanks to the Institute for Nonprofit News for serving as our fiscal sponsor.

They allow us to accept tax-exempt donations. You can learn more about INN at INN.org.

Finally, thank you to everybody who supports this show financially.

You can join in any time at arm and a leg show, dot com, slash: support.