New episode! Veteran health reporter Julie Rovner is back

Hey there —

We’re back with a brand new episode this week: Dan checks back in with Julie Rovner — chief Washington correspondent for KFF Health News and host of the podcast What The Health? — about the ever-wobblier “Jenga tower of U.S. health care”.

If that sounds anxiety-inducing, well yeah: Julie tells us she’s genuinely worried about health care being stripped from people who need it, about future health care careers and innovations being forestalled, and the fact that somehow all these stories are starting to sound normal.

Keep reading for some excerpts from that conversation — including about her new project focused on fixing what’s broken — and check out the full interview here or wherever you get your podcasts.

What’s got Julie worried? The lettuce, for a start.

When Dan and Julie spoke last year, DOGE was in the process of making an unprecedented number of cuts to health agencies.

Julie had an analogy for what she saw happening that stuck with us:

“How I’ve been thinking about this is that our healthcare system is a giant Jenga tower and it’s a little wobbly — and what holds it up is everything that happens from the Department of Health and Human Services. And they’re yanking out sticks from this Jenga tower as fast as they possibly can — and when the whole thing comes down, it’s gonna be very not pretty.”

When Dan and Julie sat down this time, Dan (maybe contemplating lunch — maybe glancing at the news) wondered: Is that why we still don’t know exactly what’s causing this massive outbreak of cyclosporiasis?

To Julie, the answer was yes.

“In a normal world, we would know by now what it was… and that’s what happens when you pull those pieces out of the Jenga tower.”

(Since they talked, Wired reported: The CDC Has a Cyclospora Lab. DOGE Downsized It Last Year.)

How Julie’s looking toward the future

Julie’s been on the health care beat in Washington for 40 years (!) That’s, um, sorta why we wanted to talk with her. She’s seen a lot — including the debates that led to the implosion of the Clinton health plan in the ‘90s and the creation of the Affordable Care Act in the 2000s.

If nothing else, those years of experience have attuned her to certain shifts in the vibe. And she really feels one coming on now:

“When we were sort of building up to the fight over the Affordable Care Act, you could sort of see it coming because everybody was unhappy, and everybody wanted to sue for peace.”

Like… doctors, hospitals, employers, drug companies. And more than anyone, the ones who really matter — those of us trying to survive and be healthy.

“Now even ‘the haves’ — what we call them — the people who have insurance… are unhappy. Everybody thinks they’re paying too much, which is why I’m predicting we’re gonna have another big public debate about this in the next four or five years.“

And that’s why Julie has embarked on a new side quest: a series on her podcast that she’s calling “How Would You Fix It?,” where she asks experts across the ideological spectrum how they would tackle our country’s health care woes.

“I’m nearing retirement myself. I feel like I have this obligation to kind of shepherd the people who wanna learn through another round of this so that we can have an educated debate and decide what we as a society wanna do about health care.”

We’ll be tuning in for sure. And there’s a lot more of this conversation where that came from, too. Here’s the rest of Dan’s chat with Julie Rovner.

Until next time,

— Emily

What’s got Julie worried? The lettuce, for a start.

How Julie’s looking toward the future

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