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I'm Beatrice Adler Bolton and today I'm joined by my co-host, Phil Rocko.

Hey.

And if you all will forgive me a tortured metaphor right here at the top, the only way I could

think of describing the state of health policy in the U.S. right now is that national U.S.

politics has felt like standing inside a circus tent that's being

buffeted by Hurricane Force winds while the ringleader of the circus keeps being like,

it's fine while every seam of the tent just like kind of splits open in real time. So that's

what we're going to talk about today. So like a Thomas Legati story or something, right?

I think there is. I think that is like the plot of a Legati story. Yeah, basically. So we're watching a government sort of shuffle through

like shutdown theatrics. We've seen an insurance marketplace that's kind of like convulsing

under its own design flaws, a political class that's been rehearsing

the same tired gestures of sort of competence and measured strategy over a landscape that they've

really kind of already abandoned. And none of this is like abstract, right? What's been going on with

the ACA, with subsidies, with Medicaid, with SNAP. This is happening inside people's lives. It's

affecting their budgets, their bodies, what they're able to eat and afford every month,

...