What’s cooking at An Arm and a Leg

Hey there —

Before we start, just to note: Yes, since we sent last week’s newsletter, Congress enacted huge cuts to Medicaid and changes to the Affordable Care Act — which will cause nearly 12 million people to lose insurance by 2034, per the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates.1

That’s on top of an estimated 5.1 million people who may lose insurance because of other ACA tweaks this year.

That’s a lot of change. And while An Arm and a Leg and First Aid Kit aren’t built for breaking news, these shifts will roll out over time — and we’re already thinking about how to help you keep up as they do.

Bottom line: Our work is more important than ever.

Meanwhile, we’ve been working on another project for a long time: Building a new website that’ll make our work easier to find and use. And we expect to finish this summer, hopefully even this month.

Why we’re doing this

We want to help people find the most useful information we can offer, quickly.

When we built the current Arm and a Leg website in 2019, we’d published fewer than 20 episodes, and anybody could scan them all pretty quickly.

Today, more than a hundred episodes later, we’ve learned SO many useful things — but for one person to sift through that pile to find something useful to them? Not so easy.

So the new site will have a much better search function. You’ll be able to browse by topic — zeroing in on stories about buying insurance, or about fighting unfair bills, or about why meds cost so freaking much, to name a few.

And we’ve started creating “starter packs” — curated collections, bringing together our best answers to frequently asked questions.

One more thing we’re adding to the new Arm and a Leg site: This newsletter.

It’s not happening immediately — obviously, you’re still getting this blast today through Substack — but soon, this newsletter’s archive will live on our website, and the email will come from our domain.

Bringing First Aid Kit over to armandalegshow.com means all our information will be in one place.

And those Starter packs (and search results) will include both podcast episodes and newsletter posts. Everything should get a lot easier to find and keep track of.

One more change

We’ve been sending out two different newsletters: First Aid Kit every week, plus an email blast when a new podcast episode drops. Those emails also include notes about stories we’re following, and other juicy stuff — and folks who only subscribe to First Aid Kit miss all of that stuff.

So we’re gonna merge the newsletters. In the spirit of putting all our information in one easy-to-find place, you’ll hear everything we need to tell you — including “new episode today” — here in First Aid Kit.

So, what about this Substack site?

We think having everything on armandalegshow.com — and sending out our emails from there — makes the most sense. (Honestly, there’s also labor involved in maintaining two sites, and two email lists.)

But if you strongly prefer getting First Aid Kit via Substack, rather than regular old email (or our site), please chime in now. (If you dislike Substack, let us know that too.)

Use the comments below, or just reply to this email — and let us know why you do or don’t want it on Substack, so we can understand what you’re looking for.

AND: Actually, this would be a great time to hear from you about this newsletter in general.

Since we brought First Aid Kit back as a weekly publication in February, what’s made the biggest impression on you? What would you like to see us do more of?

As we plan for the rest of 2025, your input means a lot.

Back next week, with a kind of postscript to our epic series on prescription drugs — both here and in the podcast.

Till then, take care of yourself.

— Dan