Andy Slavitt gives us a COVID check-in from 40,000 feet

An Arm and a Leg

Society & Culture, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Documentary

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Andy Slavitt, who ran a big chunk of health care for the Obama administration, has spent 2020 talking with almost everybody who knows anything about the COVID pandemic— and sharing what he learns in real time, first on Twitter, then on his pandemic podcast "In the Bubble." When we wanted an episode taking a look at the big picture—what we've learned so far from the pandemic and what we might expect next—Andy was the person we wanted to talk to. And he said yes!

We got into the money side of what we can expect with vaccines and testing, and treatment—which wasn’t always pretty but wasn't all bad news—and we ended up with some really big-picture questions about the profit motive in health care.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Andy Slavitt. I was in the Obama administration overseeing much of health care.
0:05.8	Now I'm a podcaster just like you at what's a show called The in the bubble.
0:12.0	Yeah, not just like me. I never ran anything for any presidential administration.
0:16.0	But here's a story. I first took notice of Andy Slavitt last March, early in the pandemic.
0:21.0	On Twitter, he would post these long threads every evening saying here's
0:24.7	the kind of folks I was talking with today and they'd be like governors and public health officials
0:28.8	and hospital administrators and he'd be like here's what I. And it was all this info I wasn't seeing anywhere else.
0:35.6	Because he was plugged in.
0:37.1	He'd worked in the Obama administration,
0:38.9	done a bunch of business side stuff.
0:40.4	So he knew who to call, and they took took his calls and he was putting out all this
0:44.0	information in real time and then he started a podcast called in the bubble a kind of
0:48.7	extension of that Twitter report one conversation at a time on tape. Political leaders, infectious disease
0:55.0	experts, public health experts, journalists, just keeping a conversation going.
0:59.0	What do we know? How do we stay safe? How do we keep our heads together in the meantime? So this fall I was
1:05.1	talking with my collaborators, Daisy Rosario and Marion Wang, who guide this show about how
1:09.9	in December we'd want to look back at the coronavirus pandemic so far and ask what we'd
1:14.3	learned like from 40,000 feet up and what we could maybe expect and we were like yeah
1:19.2	who would we want to talk to you for that and I, I was kind of thinking, Andy Slavitt? And there was a beat. And then they both said, yeah, I was kind of thinking of him too. So we asked him and he said yes.
1:33.0	This is an arm and alert, a show about the cost of health care.
1:38.0	I'm a reporter, I like a challenge, so my job here is to take one of the most
1:43.0	enraging terrifying depressing issues in American life and bring you a show that's
	...

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