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Hey there. Our show keeps asking our two big questions. Why does health care cost so freaking much and what can we, like regular people, maybe do about it?

And a lot of the time, the answers aren't especially satisfying.

The system, as you know, it's not just complicated. It's exhausting. And it often feels like it was

designed, like cleverly designed, to wear us down. So, I am definitely excited to share this episode, which is from a terrific new podcast called

Paper Trail.

It's from the investigative journalists at ProPublica.

And this story starts with a family getting absolutely clobbered.

Like, in the middle of an ongoing health crisis, their insurance company starts

denying claims and leaving them on the hook for huge amounts. And the first round of phone calls,

like you might expect, go absolutely nowhere. And what happens next, it's kind of great.

And it's not because the system suddenly works. You know,

it doesn't. But it's because one person just refused to give up. She kept digging, she kept

reading the fine print, kept asking questions. And eventually, she stumbled onto something that

insurance experts describe as one of the best kept secrets in American health care

and forced the insurance company to justify its decisions in front of an independent reviewer.

And, as you may have already guessed, the insurance company did not have much of a case to make.

So yeah, the system absolutely sucks,

...