Hey there, I have been following the world of medical bills for more than four years now,

which still makes me a newbie, really. But here's one thing that has surprised me,

beyond how much there it's known, and how deep the problems go. It's this. Sometimes,

some things do actually change for the better. Like, when I started, one of the most outrageous

problems was something called surprise bills. This is when you go someplace like a hospital that

takes your insurance, and then surprise you get a bill from somebody there who says they don't take

your insurance, and they feel free to charge you any ridiculous amount they want. And your

insurance may cover a little of it or none of it. At the start, I was like, I will be making

episodes about this outrage for a long time. Except, at the end of 2020, about two years in,

for me, Congress actually did something about this outrage. They passed a law called the No

Surprises Act, and it said, if you went somewhere in network, someplace your insurance covers,

then any bill you get from anybody there, you should be covered as if they were in network.

So they don't take your insurance, not your problem. They've got to work something out with

your insurer, and if they can't, an arbitrator steps in. That law went into effect at the beginning

of 2022, and surprise, in a lot of ways, it's working. One study shows that it's preventing a million

of these surprise bills every month, a million every month. Except, of course, you know, nothing's

perfect. And there's a lot of nuances we could look into, but one thing really stands out,

because there's actually a hole written into the law of it. You could drive an ambulance through.

We're going to look at how that hole got there, what it means, and what maybe you could get done

about it. This is an arm and a leg show about why healthcare costs of freaking much, and what we

can maybe do about it. I'm Dan Weissman, I'm reporter, and I like the challenge. So our job on this

show is to take one of the most enraging, terrifying, depressing parts of American life, bringing

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