Hey everyone, it's Ramteen here. As we start to talk about the pandemic in the past tense,

though it's certainly not over, one of the big issues we need to tackle as a country is how we

handle healthcare. Millions of people lost their jobs during the pandemic and with them,

their employer-sponsored health coverage. Meanwhile, a record number of people signed up for

Affordable Care Act health plans in 2022. So we wanted to bring you this episode we made in late

2020 about why we do health insurance the way we do and how if we wanted to, we could change that.

Hope you enjoy it.

Imagine for a moment it's the mid-1800s.

We're walking down a long dimly-lit corridor of a hospital in the US.

Rows of beds line the walls of a large open room. We step over a small puddle of water,

probably from that leak in the ceiling. And a few patients lie coughing in tattered

clothes. For most Americans, this is the last place the want to come if they get sick.

A hospital was a place where poor people went to die. Hospitals were, they were not high-tech

places, by any means. We didn't really know very much of the things that we know today about

how disease happens, how to keep infection from spreading, how to treat people surgically. We didn't

have the kind of knowledge we have today. At the time, doctors are still giving patients

mercury, toxic substance, to treat things like constipation or syphilis and bloodletting to help

balance the body. People are treated in their own homes either by someone they know or a local

doctor, but they almost never step foot in a hospital, even for surgeries. At this point,

pretty much no one has indoor plumbing, phones or cars. The average life expectancy is around 40,

and more than 30% of children don't make it to their fifth birthday. The average American spends

almost nothing on health care every year, and the idea of health insurance or health care debt

...