Episodes

  • Return to Oz

    Return to Oz
    Apr 1 2025
    For this episode, we’re going back to a familiar villain from podcast-past because unfortunately, healthcare villains have a habit of staying relevant. This is a guy who made his fame by cozying up to Oprah while schilling diet pills, supplements, and medical conspiracy theories – it’s Doctor Oz, who is now Trump’s nominee for Director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That’s right, the man who has previously claimed that there are deadly levels of arsenic in apple juice, that most olive oil is fake, that “Reparative Therapy” can cure homosexuality, and that hydroxychloroquine cures COVID, is pretty close to running our largest public health systems. Today I’m talking with Dr. Diljeet Singh of Physicians for a National Health program about what that means for you and the country at large, and how we can do something about it! NOTE: At the Medicare for All Podcast, we’ve had a brief, unplanned hiatus due to pesky technical issues – and the fact that Trump is keeping us busy in our organizing work – but we are very excited to be back! I’m flying solo right now while my regular cohost Ben is saving the environment at his 9 to 5 organizing job, but that feels like important work as well, so we’re going to give him a pass and send him our love! https://www.youtube.com/live/3ZUE4sOTI_g?si=WGg97KnP-UxktIsu Our guest for this episode was the brilliant Dr. Diljeet Singh! She's a women’s health advocate, an integrative gynecologic oncologist, and the President of Physicians for a National Health Program. Dr. Singh received her medical degree from Northwestern University and her master’s degree from the Harvard School of Public Health. She completed an obstetrics and gynecology residency at Johns Hopkins and a gynecologic oncology fellowship at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. She completed her doctoral degree in public health on cost analysis at the University of Texas School of Public Health and an associate fellowship in integrative medicine at the University of Arizona. Dr. Singh and our friends at Physicians for a National Health Program are going all out to let folks know about the serious danger Dr. Oz poses to our national health! Check out the videos from their Dr. Oz Shadow Hearing below: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO8yDO3B42TdHs6GC-PcLez2ZHfZ4CfTN&si=Q3YMJR1IEvr9uHX1 Even though it is likely that the Senate will make it official later this month, as of April 1st, Dr. Oz still hasn't been confirmed, so if you're listening to this in the next couple weeks, you may still be able to call your Senators to ask them to come to their senses! Reach their offices through the Capitol Hill switchboard: (202) 224-3121. Follow & Support the Pod! Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform! This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund! This show is a project of the Healthcare-NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at our website, healthcare-now.org.
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    42 mins
  • 20 Years of Healthcare NOW!

    20 Years of Healthcare NOW!
    Mar 27 2025
    Listeners, what were you doing in 2004? Perhaps you were strolling down the street in low rise jeans, Uggs, and a Livestrong bracelet listening to Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” Or maybe you were sitting in a movie theater ready to have your mind blown by Ashton Kutcher’s tour de force performance in The Butterfly Effect. Well, the folks joining us on this week’s episode of our podcast may have missed some of that stuff because they were too busy building a movement for healthcare justice! 2024 marks the 20th anniversary of Healthcare NOW, the national organization fighting for Medicare for All that brings you your favorite podcast! If you’re a regular listener, you probably know that I was the Executive Director of Healthcare NOW for 11 years, and Gillian is the current Executive Director, but today we’re taking it back to 2004 and talking with some of the OGs who started it all! This episode features some of our very favorite people -- the leaders in the healthcare justice movement who have made Healthcare NOW what it is today (the creator of your favorite podcast content!): Mark Dudzic is a longtime union organizer and activist. He served as national organizer of the Labor Party from 2003 to 2007 and was a cofounder of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer in 2009. He has been a member of the Healthcare Now board since its founding in 2004. Lindy Hern is the Chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and President of the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology. She has been on the Healthcare NOW board since 2009 and is the author of “Single Payer Healthcare Reform: Grassroots Mobilization and the Turn Against Establishment Politics in the Medicare for All Movement." Donna Smith is an advocate for single payer, improved and expanded Medicare for all. Her journalism career included work as a stringer for NEWSWEEK magazine, editing and reporting for the Black Hills Pioneer in South Dakota, as well as appearances on CNN and Bill Moyers Journal, and as one of the subjects in Michael Moore's 2007 film, SiCKO. She worked for National Nurses United and traveled more than 250,000 miles advocating for health justice. She now serves as the National Advisory Board chair for Progressive Democrats of America. Walter Tsou is a Board Advisor to Physicians for a National Health Program and on the Board of HCN. He has been a long time single payer healthcare activist. Walter is a former Health Commissioner of Philadelphia and Past President of the American Public Health Association. Cindy Young has been a healthcare activist for over 40 years. She has served on the Health Care Now board since 2012. In her retirement, she serves as a Vice President for the California Alliance for Retired Americans (CARA), whose principle goal is to establish a single payer system in California. If this episode doesn't give you your fill of Healthcare NOW history, you can always check out Lindy's book or this sweet tribute to our founder Marilyn Clement. And of course, if you want to keep up the good work of all these amazing folks, you can make a donation to support our work!
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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • MAHA: Getting to Know RFK Jr.

    MAHA: Getting to Know RFK Jr.
    Feb 11 2025
    Well, the voters have spoken, and despite all of our recommendations to the contrary, they seem to have voted for Trump. Yeah, we’re pretty sad/scared/pissed off/trying to cope by dissociating and stress eating as well. Regardless, once again, it’s Trump’s America and we’re just living (or dying) in it. We know from experience that a Trump presidency is bad for our health, but now he has a surprising new ally in making our lives shorter and more dangerous: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhwR1W_x-TA Show Notes RFK is a former presidential candidate and critic of Trump, an expert falconer, an eater of roadkill, a source of shame for the entire Kennedy family, and a “superspreader” of false information about vaccines. And now he’s about to bring his mission to Make America Healthy Again to the masses as the Secretary of Health and Human Services for the entire USA. In this episode, we’re going to try to figure out what the hell that means. RFK Jr has some wild ideas about medicine and public health, making some strange connections between cause and effect in our health. Let’s play a game! We’ll give you some health outcomes, and you guess what RFK has said is the cause of the problem (or “problem” in several cases). (Sources: BBC, HuffPo, Daily Beast) Problem: Autism, cancer, autoimmune disorders, and ADHDCause: Vaccines! This assertion is primarily based on the fact that SOME earlier vaccines included a preservative thimerosal, a compound that contains mercury, even though it’s been debunked AND hasn’t been included in children’s vaccines since 2001. Problem: Arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid diseaseCause: Fluoride in drinking water! Problem: Fatness, depression, and cancerCause: Ultra Processed Foods Solution: Raw milk! Problem: AIDSCause: Not HIV! (See his book about Anthony Faucci) Problem: Increasing concentrations of bioavailable aluminum in the environmentCause: Chemtrails This one’s a trick question because in a 2016, a survey of scientists showed that most of them didn’t even believe that aluminum levels were increasing, let alone that chemtrails exist. Problem: Gay and Trans KidsCause: Pesticides (atrazine) in tap water. Amazing logic here: “[atrazine can] chemically castrate and forcibly feminize [frogs]... If it’s doing that to frogs, there’s a lot of other evidence that it’s doing it to human beings as well.” Problem: COVID 19Cause: Chinese bioweapon. His logic (from a campaign video leaked to the NY Post): “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. We don’t know if it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential and the impact of that. We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons.” A heaping helping of anti-Asian racism with a side of antisemitism! Problem: RFK Jr’s own problems with memory loss and cognitionCause: He said in a 2012 divorce deposition, “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” Also, tuna fish. He hasn’t ever provided medical records to document this, but doctors say it might have happened? Despite the fact that he’s about to be nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr. isn’t a doctor or a medical researcher. The brain worm explains a lot about RFK Jr’s thinking, but neural parasites aside, how did this guy get to be a “public health expert” to begin with? He started as a well-respected environmental lawyer. In 1984, he began volunteering with The Hudson River Fisherman's Association, later renamed “Riverkeeper,” which inspired the global “Waterkeeper” movement. He sued big polluters, helped formulate a model for sustainable development,
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    46 mins
  • Medicaid Privatization Smackdown in Connecticut!

    Medicaid Privatization Smackdown in Connecticut!
    Nov 13 2024
    We spend a lot of time griping about the insidious power of corporate health insurance in our healthcare system here. But you would expect that taxpayer funded public programs for our most vulnerable friends and neighbors are free from profiteering right? Sadly, no. Medicaid - the public program that serves the lowest income Americans, plus some people with disabilities, and a lot of the country’s long-term care - has been extensively privatized in most states. Hoping to trim budgets, most states have outsourced Medicaid recipients to “Medicaid Managed Care Organizations,” which are actually private insurance companies. And with private insurance comes the barriers to care we know all too well, like prior authorizations, denial of claims, and narrow networks. These are all part of the private insurance/public programs business model: the more care they avoid paying for, the more money from those capitated payments they get to keep. But today we have a rare ray of sunshine: a state showing there’s another way to provide care, not just coverage, to some of their most vulnerable residents. In 2012 Connecticut kicked the private insurance-run Managed Care Organizations out of their Medicaid program. They took on Big Insurance and won. Our guest today will walk us through how it went down. Sheldon Toubman has been a litigation attorney for Disability Rights Connecticut since 2021, and a leader of the efforts to remove Managed Care Organizations from the state’s Medicaid program. Before that, he was a staff attorney with New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA), where he spent 30 years representing and working on behalf of Medicaid enrollees. He engages in a variety of strategies on behalf of people with disabilities, from litigation to legislative advocacy and public education through media, webinars and other means. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM7dRzHkVu0&t=1804s Show Notes Sheldon tells us that before 2012, Connecticut’s Medicaid program was bifurcarted: eligible kids, pregnant people, and families were in a capitated Managed Care Organization (MCO) model and people with disabilities were in a fee-for-service program. (Medicaid is funded with federal dollars, but unlike Medicare, states design the programs and make all the decisions about plans.) With a fee-for-service model, the state takes on the risk. With the MCO model, the MCO receives a per-person/per-month fee (a "capitated payment") from the state, and they have to provide the care; if the patient requires less care, the MCO keeps the money, but if the patient requires more care, the MCO has to pay for the amount above the per-person/per-month fee. MCOs had a financial incentive to deny care so they could recoup more money. Beginning in the late 1990s, Medicaid advocates began a campaign of lawsuits and lobbying to remove Managed Care from their Medicaid program. Hartford, Connecticut is known as the insurace capital of the US, so this was a tough fight. Insurance companies fought this campaign because public programs are a major profit center for insurers, often more profitable than private employer-sponsored insurance. The insurance industry claimed they provided excellent care for less money, and coordinated care in a way that's not possible with the fee-for-service model. The insurance industry also ran ads about all the jobs they provide, and legislators were afraid to tangle with them. When the state asked for data about how the MCOs spent public dollars, they refused to provide it. So advocates only had anecdotal information, and it was hard to refute the claims the MCOs made about how well they served patients. One of the anecdotal complaints they heard the most was the lack of access to providers. Advocates convinced the state to check the insurance company provider network lists, so the state instituted a Secret Shopper survey to analyze them. They found that patients could get an appointment with supposed in-netw...
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    56 mins
  • Boo and Vote Local!

    Boo and Vote Local!
    Oct 21 2024
    In case you’ve been asleep or under a rock for the past six months, we need to let you know two things: First, Kendrick won his beef with Drake, and second, there is a presidential election coming up. Like any presidential election year, everyone’s so focused on the big showdown at the top of the ticket, but that means that a lot of the local and state races, congressional races, and referenda that will make up most of your ballot are getting ignored. Just because Anderson Cooper isn’t covering your city’s mayoral contest or your state’s Railroad Commissioner race doesn’t mean those elections aren’t critically important in determining the immediate future of your community and getting important issues like healthcare on the table! So for this episode, we’re going to leave the speculation about Donald and Kamala to Anderson and take our own 360 view of why we all need to get in on the down-ballot action and how we bring healthcare justice to the forefront of our election conversations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY6SAa8LU9c Show Notes We have two guests who know their way around a Get Out the Vote Drive! Jasmine Ruddy is the Assistant Director of Campaigns for National Nurses United. She helps lead NNU's political campaigns from Medicare for All to electoral work and more! Her background is in the climate justice movement and campus/student organizing in her home state of North Carolina Jonathan Cohn is the Policy Director at Progressive Massachusetts, which does multi-issue advocacy work. Jonathan wears many hats in the political space in Massachusetts and has been active in many progressive issue and electoral campaigns over the past little over a decade. Jasmine describes the local campaign that got her hooked: as a campus organizer for climate justice she helped win ballot measures to pass a regional transit tax. It was a concrete and tangible way to make an impact on the climate justice movement. Jonathan cut his political teeth on the Obama 2012 campaign, and got the local politics bug when Boston Mayor Tom Menino retired. Twelve candidates came forward for the first open mayoral race in 20 years. He was especially interested in public school policies and funding. He volunteered for mayoral candidate and City Council Member Felix Arroyo Jr. Ben confesses that while he loves democracy, he hates elections (#relatable). But he does find more hopefulness at the local level. He also got started in a mayoral election in Boston, but the most exciting campaign he worked on was for state house. He lived in one of the most progressive districts in the state but their state representative was a powerful, well-funded right-leaning Democrat. Ben's candidate, Nika Elugardo, a true progressive beat him despite all those advantages. Picture it: New Jersey, 1990s, tween Gillian lives in a suburb (North Plainfield) seeking to change its name to distance itself from the majority Black and Brown city of Plainfield. During a town-wide debate on the ballot measure, young Gillian spoke against renaming the city. She was quoted on the front page of the local paper: "North Plainfield shouldn't change its name. Stonybrook is just a dirty brook that divides our town, just like this issue is doing right now." The anti-name change side won and our star was born. We discuss the additional influence a voter can have when working on a local election. When races can be won or lost by a few dozen votes, the candidates care a lot more about each individual. They may knock on your door or call you seeking support, which is a great opportunity to insert the issues you care about into the election. Once your candidate gets elected, they'll remember the folks who helped them get there and you'll have more influence when lobbying them on the issues you care about. (You may even end up with a job.) Jonathan's personal philosophy is "Boo and Vote." He never liked Obama's catchphrase "don't boo; v...
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    50 mins
  • Medical Debt in the I.O.U.SA

    Medical Debt in the I.O.U.SA
    Sep 30 2024
    The United States is unique among industrialized nations. Lucky for us, we can accumulate medical debt! Most industrialized and some developing nations have national healthcare programs that guarantee care to their residents. But we in the richest nation in the world have the freedom to get insurance through the free market, and go into debt when it doesn’t cover the care we need! USA USA USA! According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), while over 90% of Americans have health insurance, we owe at least $220 billion in medical debt. Approximately 14 million people owe more than $1,000, and about 3 million owe more than $10,000. When the debt is cast more widely to those who have put medical bills on their credit cards or borrowed money to pay them, KFF found that 41% of adults have healthcare debt. According to the US Census Bureau in 2021, Black and Latinx households are disproportionately affected by medical debt. Today we’ll dive into the topic of medical debt: who has it, who profits off it, and what can we do about it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZPd1kFbEuE Show Notes What causes medical debt? Believe it or not, our freewheeling use of the healthcare system is not to blame. In the US medical debt is caused by the high prices charged by hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies. While most industrialized nations have some means of controlling prices, in the United States the healthcare industry sets prices more or less however they want. As a result, according to a nationwide poll in 2022, over a five year period more than half of US adults report going into debt because of medical bills. Debt is preventing Americans from saving for retirement, paying for college, or buying a home. The 2022 poll found that 1 in 7 people reported being denied care due to unpaid bills. Two-thirds of those polled reported putting off necessary care due to cost. This is all despite the Affordable Care Act expanding insurance coverage to more Americans than ever before. Insurance companies increasingly shift costs onto patients, with higher deductibles and more claim denials. According to the 2022 KFF poll, 61% of insured Americans had medical debt in the previous five years. What makes medical debt so dangerous? We know health systems are denying care to patients who have unpaid bills. And we know people put off care so they don’t incur more debt. Those barriers to care make us sicker, and they disproportionately impact people with higher rates of chronic conditions. The Commonwealth Fund found that 54% of people with employer coverage who skipped or delayed care reported getting sicker; 61% in individual market plans and 63% with Medicare reported the same. A 2024 study published in the Journal of American Medical Association found that medical debt is associated with higher mortality and premature death. What happens when you can’t pay your medical debt? When you think about all the real people on the end of those medical debts, that makes it all the harder to swallow a fact that gets relatively little attention in the broader conversation. Medical debt collection is a for-profit business. In many cases, non-profit hospitals sell debts to for-profit medical debt collections agencies. Some health systems even operate their own for-profit debt collection arms. Think of it: They set the prices for their services as high as they want, and on the other end of the equation, they’re making money off debt collection. Dr. Luke Messac of Brigham and Women’s Hospital testified at a July hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that he learned that his and many other hospitals as well as collection agencies report sick, vulnerable patients to credit bureaus, garnish wages, seize bank accounts, and seek warrants for their arrest. And again, we have to highlight the evil practice of hospital systems that restrict patients from getting n...
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    7 mins
  • Episode 102: Committable

    Episode 102: Committable
    Aug 26 2024
    Usually on the Medicare for All Podcast, we talk about people who want healthcare but can’t get it, but today we’re talking about people getting healthcare they have specifically refused: folks who have been involuntarily committed. For plenty of our listeners, the idea of being held against your will at a psychiatric institution feels like a nightmare from another time – something out of gothic fiction or horror movies set far in the past. But for folks struggling with mental illness in 21st century America, the terrifying prospect of psychiatric commitment is alive and well. In fact, a 2020 UCLA study found that in the 25 states where they actually keep data on this, the numbers of involuntary psych detentions have been sharply rising in recent years. Today, we’re joined by two experts in this dark corner of our healthcare system to talk about why so many people are getting committed and who is reaping the benefits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjXjCSIM_2E Show Notes Originally from Massachusetts Jesse Mangan has experienced a few different psychiatric hospitalizations and has spent over two decades struggling with the impacts of those experiences, so now he produces a podcast about mental health laws called Committable. Rob Wipond is a freelance journalist who writes frequently on the interfaces between psychiatry, civil rights, policing, surveillance and privacy, and social change. His articles have been nominated for seventeen magazine and journalism awards. He is also the author of the 2023 book Your Consent Is Not Required: The Rise in Psychiatric Detentions, Forced Treatment, and Abusive Guardianships. Jesse shares how he came to have so much (unwanted) expertise in psychiatric commitments, and how he turned that experience into a podcast, Committable. He was involuntarily committed and held longer than the standard of care dictated, past the date his insurance ran out. He was finally discharged with no real discharge plan and a big bill. Rob tells us he's been writing about mental health for a couple of decades. He says that the media typically portrays people who have been committed as really out of touch with reality, but he's found that they're far more like the rest of us. He watched his dad - who had no history of mental illness - go through a catastrophic health crisis that led to a depressive episode. Rob tells us that his dad was held and treated against his will for months. This happened in Canada where healthcare is guaranteed, so it's a more complex problem than just enacting the right financing system. A lot of people tend to think of psychiatric commitment as a barbaric tactic from the bad old days – like Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – but this is obviously a practice that continues to this day. It's more common now for people to be held for a few days, rather than months or years on end. We only have data on these commitments from 25 states, but they show that these kind of commitments are rising dramatically. Jesse explains that due to disability rights activism and investigative journalism, a number of federal cases in the 1970s established some basic due process standards for patients. At the same time the mental health system became increasingly privatized and our understanding of mental health changed dramatically. The expense of due process became a factor - as soon as a case reaches a court hearing, private providers become more likely to release the patient because of cost. State mental health laws have given a lot of authority to law enforcement and providers to detain patients on an emergency basis without a due process check until the point the facility wants to hold the patient beyond the emergency period (in many states 72 hours). The justification for holding these patients are often very vague and broad, posing a risk to many Americans. Mental healthcare in this country isn't a clearly defined system.
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    44 mins
  • Project 2025 Will Kill Us All

    Project 2025 Will Kill Us All
    Aug 19 2024
    If there’s one thing everyone is talking about these days, it’s JD Vance’s affinity for couches. But if there are two things everyone is talking about, it’s Vance’s couches and Project 2025. You may be wondering, what is this mysterious project, and what does it have to do with me? Well, it turns out, a lot! Project 2025 is the right-wing map to a terrifying future, and if its proponents have their way, the future of healthcare is especially grim. Today, we’re doing a deep dive into what this thing is and how it could change healthcare as we know it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4kYQ-Hh5pY Show Notes Gillian Mason, Healthcare-NOW's Executive Director, has read Project 2025 so you don't have to. P25 is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation, the think tank founded in 1973 because conservative businessmen thought Richard Nixon was too liberal (remember that Nixon created the EPA and advocated for a better national health plan than Obamacare, so they weren’t all wrong). They really hit their stride during the Reagan administration when they wrote his policy playbook, which they called the “Mandate for Leadership” — Reagan implemented or initiated about 60 percent of the 2,000 policy changes they recommended. They do this Mandate for Leadership report now every presidential cycle, and it’s been pretty influential whenever a Republican wins. These people are unabashed fascists. We use that term a lot kind of casually but these guys literally fit the Merriam-Webster Webster dictionary definition: “a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.” The Heritage Foundation’s whole deal is consolidating all authority in the office of the president so he can implement severe economic and social regimentation based on nationalism and barely-veiled-when-it’s-not-just-blatant racism. Project 2025 It’s the “Mandate for Leadership” for this election season, so it’s supposed to be a template for Trump’s next four years. Although reading Project 2025 would make you think it was a room full of monkeys at typewriters type situation, it was actually written by a room full of Trump’s cronies. Hundreds of people contributed to writing and researching this thing, and a hefty percentage were former Trump appointees and employees of the administration. Also, VP pick JD Vance just wrote the foreword for an upcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the head of the P25 team. Vance has also been a mouthpiece for some of the wilder shit in P25. Trump claims he really doesn’t know much about P25. But it’s still worth talking about because COINCIDENTALLY it turns out that a lot of his policies are the same as the ones in P25. The Premise: The liberals in Washington, in cahoots with Chinese Communists and the “totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening’” have put “the very moral foundations of our society are in peril.” (This is not an exaggeration— it’s literally all on the first page) P25 has 4 main goals: Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’” All the recommendations are laid out systematically according to the different areas of the federal government they want to control (The Executive Office, Department of Homeland Security, Intelligence Services, Media Agencies, etc.) We’ll mainly be focusing on healthcare today but context is important so here are a few highlights of what they’re planning to give you some flavor: Reclassify most federal employees as appointees
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    58 mins