Good morning, current affairs listeners. I am Ashling McCray, Podmaster General. I am here today with a very special guest. We have Libby Watson. She is a journalist and former staff writer for the New Republic. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Vice, New York Magazine, amongst many others. And now she is launching a substack newsletter called SickNote, a newsletter about America's broken healthcare system.

Hello, Libby. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. Yes, we're having a Brits only podcast today. We're only going to be talking about smack barn pee wet. We're going to be pronouncing shear correctly, Worcestershire, Hartfordshire.

We're going to be pronouncing all the shears and we're going to be doing them correctly.

All right, putting the extra iron, aluminium.

Right, so you've written about a lot of political topics throughout the years, but even before this

newsletter, one of the topics you've written on most frequently is healthcare. So I just thought

I'd start by asking, what kind of drew you to that topic? I mean, to be honest, a lot of it was

probably to do with Bernie Sanders. You're sort of making it something that was, you know, I think,

obviously more prominent in the discourse, but as well, just the sort of single payer movement

in general. I, you know, I grew up as kind of a, I was, I was kind of a lib. You know, when I first

moved to America, I was like very much of that generation that, you know, I was 18 when

Obama got elected and I like kind of believed in all of that stuff. You know, I was a bit of a

bit of a West Wing idiot. And, you know, healthcare was like the, you know, I feel like the,

I remember when, you know, the public option was kind of kiboshed in the first, you know,

early on in the ACA fight. And that I feel like was the first moment where I was really like,

damn. Like, I'm an idiot. I should not have believed all this stuff. And I think, you know,

when, when Bernie ran in 2016 and, you know, beyond then, for me, it was like, oh, we actually can talk about single payer.

Like, we can talk about the prospect of having, you know, a good healthcare system.

But, you know, I mean, I was writing about politics for Splinter at the time and, you know,

it just sort of naturally gravitated towards writing about healthcare in part because

obviously being British, I think having that experience of a proper healthcare system can really

radicalise you pretty quickly. Like the first time you have to learn what a deductible is and things

...