Lessons from “wrestling with a giant”

An Arm and a Leg

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

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2023

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The ER visit was quick and uneventful. The bill was $1,300. Our listener decided to push back. He didn't win, but he learned a lot — and so did we.

We had help, from an expert we met by visiting a Renaissance Fair — which we did in this very fun early episode. Kaelyn Globig, head of advocacy for the Rescu Foundation, is a medical-bill wizard, and no one has taught us more.

In this story, she teaches us how to find out what Medicare pays for a given procedure — here’s the guide she shared with us — and how to use that information.

We also got advice on dealing with debt collectors — when it makes sense to file a dispute — from April Kuenhoff, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center.

She shared resources too. Here are sample letters — templates you can edit:

To tell a debt collector that you are disputing a charge.
To demand verification of a debt they say you owe
To limit their legal right to harass you.

Here’s a transcript of the episode.

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

And of course we’d love for you to support this show.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey there. You know, sometimes experiments fail. And when we're lucky, well, one, nothing
0:05.6	life-changingly awful happens. And two, we learn stuff. That's the kind of story we've
0:11.9	got today. It starts with a note from a listener named Sandeep Swamy. And when we first
0:17.0	talked, he was in a fighting spirit.
0:19.6	The facilities are doing nothing but taking advantage of a vulnerable situation, right,
0:23.2	which the patient is already in.
0:24.8	He was fighting a medical bill, and he had a question, I didn't know the answer to you.
0:28.7	But I wanted to know. And I knew exactly who I wanted to ask. And it wasn't an academic
0:34.8	researcher or a lawyer or whatever, but somebody whose credentials were a lot more informal
0:41.4	was one of my favorite people I've ever talked with for this show. And I wanted to put
0:45.2	her together with Sandeep. In the end, Sandeep's experiment did not work out the way he
0:50.1	hoped. And he was disappointed, but he'll be okay. And meanwhile, we did get the answer
0:56.0	to that question. We had a great conversation with that expert. And we learned some useful
1:01.1	lessons.
1:04.2	This is an arm and a leg show about why healthcare costs so freaking much and what we can maybe
1:08.2	do about it. I'm Dan Weissman. I'm a reporter and I like a challenge. So our job on this
1:12.8	show is to take one of the most enraging, terrifying, depressing parts of American
1:17.5	life and bring you something entertaining and powering and useful.
1:25.5	Sandeep lives in the Bay area, works in software, came to this country from India 14 years ago.
1:30.0	I'm basically an immigrant and the whole system over here was kind of completely new to me.
1:36.7	He was used to something a little more basic, but adequate and way more affordable. The
1:41.5	last few years, he's had a high deductible insurance plan. It has gotten him very interested
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from An Arm and a Leg, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of An Arm and a Leg and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.