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hey there sometimes we have more rights than we think and more options in, I am starting to think that is true a lot of the time. I mean, actually

enforcing our rights, that can be tough. But just knowing that we have them, that seems like a pretty good start. I've done a bunch of stories

recently with NPR and our pals at Kaiser Health News for their Bill of the

month series and honestly a lot of them I do not share on this podcast because they're basically dead-end stories.

Stories where a super nice, reasonable, resourceful person gets a bill that makes no sense and goes to work fighting it and it's a dead end.

Usually these stories have a sort of happy ending like the hospital or the insurance company or whoever gets a call from a reporter and something they're like

ah tell NPR we're fixing this, okay?

And they fix this one thing, this one time.

I mean, pretty much every story in this series ends like that,

which, you know, is good for the individual person and

maybe there's a little bit of satisfaction in hearing yes see these guys

cave when they get caught but it doesn't exactly do much to inspire confidence for the rest of us.

One of these stories I did last fall I really wished it had gone another way.

The woman in this story, Tiffany Jill, was such a fighter and just a stand-up person.

I liked her a lot. I loved how determined she was and how thoughtful.

But her story was a total dead end until a reporter showed up.

And actually, in the web version of the story,

the reporter from Kaiser Health News

...