For your holiday giving list

Hey there—

This newsletter is about to take a winter holiday break. You deserve one too. You’ve picked out some health insurance for next year! You could use some downtime. 

I want you to drink eggnog with your loved ones, re-watch It’s a Wonderful Life, or whatever brings you comfort and/or joy — which is NOT stressing about the horrible cost of health care. 

And you may be considering some year-end charitable giving — maybe even in someone else’s name as a gift? — and that could mean helping other people deal with the horrible cost of health care. 

Of course, you are definitely welcome to support us as a way of doing that, but I also have a list for you, places that I respect a ton. We’ve featured their work on An Arm and a Leg. 

We want to hear about your favorite orgs too. Don’t be shy!

And even if you don’t have money to give, I think it may cheer you up to know what these folks are up to. Works for me.

Fucking-A, let’s go.

The folks at Dollar For lit up 2021 for me. In January, their founder went super-viral on TikTok with a recipe for crushing medical debt by leveraging a little-known fact: Most hospitals are legally obligated to offer charity care. 

By mid-year, they had leveraged that viral fame to raise a small army of volunteers to level up everything they were doing. 

Donate to Dollar For here.

The volunteer-driven Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium started by providing free COVID testing to Black Philadelphians in the early days of the pandemic. After the city made a disastrous mistake in early 2021 — entrusting vaccinations to a young white tech-bro-wanna-be…the Consortium stepped up and led Philadelphia to the highest Black vaccination rate of any U.S. city. 

Donate to the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium here. 

Remote Area Medical runs free pop-up clinics across the country. One of those sites played a role as the Ghost of Christmas Past in the tale of Wendell Potter.

Donate to Remote Area Medical here.

RIP Medical Debt pools money to buy up old medical debt and forgive it. By doing bulk transactions, they can take a $5 donation and use it to discharge $500 in debt. We featured their work in this 2019 episode.

Donate to RIP Medical Debt here.

MLK 50: Justice Through Journalism does powerful investigative reporting. After they exposed how the biggest hospital in Memphis was suing patients over unpaid bills, the hospital was shamed into dropping thousands of lawsuits and erasing almost $12 million in debt.

Donate to MLK 50 here.

How’s all that treating you? Pretty good, right?  And one more thing about supporting us. Through December, any gift you make to us counts for double, thanks to a program called NewsMatch. You can chip in right here.

Thank you! OK, go drink that eggnog. I’ll catch you in January. We’ve got a LOT of work to do. 

Till then, take care of yourself.

Dan