It’s official: This is our favorite project of the year

Remember Thomas Sanford, the fourth-year medical student who created a one-page resource for dealing with medical expenses?

With help from some of you, he’s got a new draft — and a plan to keep making this tool better and better — hopefully with help from even more of you.

That virtuous cycle — and its potential to keep growing — makes this our favorite story of the year.

For today’s podcast episode, we caught up with Thomas to get the latest on this project and how you can help keep it going.

A med student’s idea to keep his patients from a “financial death sentence”

You may remember: Back in April, Thomas wrote to us asking if we had a “one-stop shop” handout with resources for managing high medical costs that he could share with his patients.

As he told Dan when they spoke this week, his patients come from one of the poorest sections of Brooklyn, and he knew that a visit to the hospital could be “a financial death sentence.”

He’d already started spreading the word about hospital financial assistance (aka “charity care”). But he wanted something more comprehensive he could share — maybe a guide to all our best resources.

So we gave it a shot. And we encouraged you to share resources we might’ve missed.

Fast forward to now, Thomas built on our initial draft, and thanks to your additions and feedback, it got a makeover, with a fresh title and some new content.

In this week’s mini-episode, listen to how Thomas is putting this resource to use, and how he hopes others will use it — and build on it.

Including you.

Let’s keep pushing this forward, together

We want to get this one-pager into the best shape — and into as many hands — as possible.

Here’s where you come in. Some possibilities:

• Print out the current version and pass it around: Download it right here.
• Make suggestions for the next version: Anybody can comment on this Google doc.
• Volunteer to pitch in: Got design skills? Editorial chops? Language skills, to translate it? Other ideas? Here’s a sign-up form.

It would be so cool to get as much feedback on this document as possible! Like…we’re dreaming 20 or 30 of you review it? 100?! As many as we can get!

And: you can actually spin up your own version of it.

Thomas is using a Creative Commons license — which means that you can make and distribute your own version. As long as you credit the original, and make your own version available to share under the same terms, you can re-publish it, update it, or customize it however you like.

For instance, you can add local resources. (If you work at a hospital, Thomas suggests replacing the Dollar For link with a link to your local hospital’s charity care policy. Or translate it into a different language.)

And if you do, please tell us — we want to hear about it.

Seeing this project come together — with our audience connecting and pitching in to build something — is a dream come true for us. And it’s a reminder of how much we can accomplish as a community. Let’s keep it going.

Now, some newsletter news, and a quick ask

As we’ve mentioned in recent First Aid Kits, we have a new-and-improved website, with features we’re really jazzed about, like Starter Packs — basically An Arm and a Leg-101.

And one of those new features: this newsletter! We’ve been working to move First Aid Kit from Substack’s email system to our own. So, starting next week, you should receive this newsletter from armandalegshow.com.

If change makes you nervous, don’t worry — everything else about First Aid Kit is staying the same.

To make sure First Aid Kit doesn’t land in your spam folder — please take a few seconds to whitelist us. Here’s how.

Meanwhile, we’ll keep posting our newsletter on Substack over the next few weeks, in case folks are having any technical difficulties getting our email and want a reliable place to find us.

And we’ll be following up with folks who don’t seem to be getting our newsletter after we migrate, so don’t worry about getting left behind.

Please reach out if you have questions about whitelisting or anything else about this transition.

That’s all from me. See you from dan@armandalegshow.com next week!

Best,

Claire