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Hey listeners, it's Lindsay Smith-Rogers. Today, health insurance.

Jonathan Cohn is a journalist and author known for his extensive writing

on the health care system and the politics surrounding it. Today, he joined Stephanie Desmond to discuss

health insurance. What do recent government cuts mean for people who can no longer afford it? Why is

health care in many countries considered a basic right? and why has that never been the case in the

United States? Let's listen. Jonathan Cohn, thanks so much for joining me. Stephanie, thank you.

I am a huge fan of this podcast, so I'm very excited to be on it. I'm a fan of yours, so the admiration is

mutual. I wanted to talk today about health insurance in America. A very big topic,

obviously, to cover a short amount of time. When last I spoke about this on the podcast, there was

a great concern that the subsidies that had been given to people who have Obamacare, which is

from the Affordable Care Act insurance, that they were going to lose their subsidies

and that many, many millions of people would likely be unable to afford health insurance anymore.

I also know that the government shut down over this last year. So I'm wondering if you could

give a quick look at the landscape of where those subsidies are now and what's happening to people.

Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. So just to sort of

set the stage, you know, the Affordable Care Act has a bunch of different provisions in order to

make insurance more available to people who don't have employer coverage or make too much money

to qualify for Medicaid. We created these insurance exchanges. If you buy insurance, this way,

...