Health insurance post-Roe, and a grassroots network of abortion funds

An Arm and a Leg

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

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2022

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion has been banned in more than a dozen states. As you choose your insurance plan for next year, you might be wondering: How does that affect my insurance plan? We learned two big things.

First: There’s no one answer (and few answers are settled yet). A lot depends on where you live, and where you work.

But second: For lots of people, for a long time, insurance has rarely been a help in accessing abortion. Most people pay cash. And lots of people can’t afford to.

But there are organizations who have been tackling this issue for decades — abortion funds.

We’re big fans of when regular people find a way to help each other survive this messed-up, profit-driven health care system — and abortion funds are a huge example of that kind of effort. There’s a lot we can learn from them.

We talk with Oriaku Njoko, executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, and Tyler Barbarin, a board member with the New Orleans Abortion Fund, to learn from their experience.

Here's a transcript of this episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, today's episodes started with a question that seemed pretty of the moment,
0:04.5	and very much our kind of question.
0:06.9	The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer.
0:09.9	How does that affect my insurance coverage?
0:12.4	And we found a couple of things.
0:15.1	One, it's probably not changing your insurance, like not yet.
0:18.4	And for a lot of people, not at all.
0:20.2	But if you get your insurance from work, there's no one answer.
0:24.1	We've entered an extremely weird period, and we're going to be here for a while.
0:29.6	And two, producer Emily Pisa Kratos reporting for this episode shows there's actually another
0:35.1	question.
0:36.1	Like a whole other story here that turns out to be even more our kind of thing.
0:40.1	Hey Emily.
0:41.1	Hey Dan, and yep, this is a story about people organizing to help each other get the health
0:45.9	care they need, building a huge network, and making the most of limited resources in
0:51.4	the face of so much powerful opposition.
0:54.2	Yeah, and look, however you happen to feel about abortion itself, I hope you're going
0:58.0	to agree, that's the kind of story we can all learn from.
1:02.0	This is an arm in a leg, a show about why healthcare costs so freaking much, and what we can
1:06.2	maybe do about it.
1:07.2	And Dan Weissman, I'm a reporter, and I like a challenge.
1:10.2	So our job on this show is to take one of the most raging, terrifying, depressing parts
	...

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