“Your Money or Your Life”: Dr. Luke Messac’s book on the history of medical debt

An Arm and a Leg

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

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 November 2023

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2019, Dr. Luke Messac was a medical resident who found himself spending his day off in a courthouse archive. He’d heard about hospitals suing their own patients over unpaid medical bills. He wanted to know if the hospitals he worked in were doing the same. They were.

Trained as a historian, Messac then set out to trace the history of this phenomenon, and the story of medical debt in the U.S.

His new book, Your Money or Your Life is the result of that research.

Luke Messac sat down with us for a chat about how he got interested in medical debt, how medical debt became the massive problem it is today, and what he thinks people who work in health care can do to start to fix it.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Dan. Super quick. If you appreciate what we're doing here on an arm and a leg,
0:04.4	I want to ask you to help us out. The biggest source of funding for this show is you. And right now,
0:10.0	any donation you make is going to be matched dollar per dollar. Thanks to News Match from the
0:15.2	Institute for Nonprofit News. Like you give us 50 bucks, they make it a hundred just like that.
0:20.8	You can do that right now at armandalakeshow.com slash support. Thanks. Okay, here's the show.
0:27.1	Hey there. A couple of years ago, I got in touch with a guy who'd been posting about this show on
0:32.0	Twitter. Hi. Yeah, my name's Luke Messick. I am a instructor of an emergency medicine at
0:38.4	Brighamon Women's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School. And he's a PhD historian.
0:44.1	And he told me he was writing a history of something we cover a lot on this show. Medical Dent.
0:49.7	It's a problem I couldn't avoid. And therefore, I couldn't avoid writing about.
0:53.6	And now that book is out. It's called Your Money or Your Life. And it tells the story of how
0:58.5	the collection of medical debt in the US became so aggressive. And the real impact it has on patients.
1:04.4	And especially important for us, a different way to do things.
1:11.1	This is an arm and a leg show about why healthcare costs so freaking much. And what we can maybe do
1:15.7	about it. I'm Dan Weissman. I'm a reporter and I like a challenge. So our job on this show is to
1:21.1	take one of the most reaching, terrifying, depressing parts of American life, bringing
1:25.9	you something entertaining and powering and useful.
1:32.2	Luke Messick says his journey begins with the sky. It's not intellectually
1:39.0	shallow to have hope as a profound thing. That is Paul Farmer. And yes, you may have heard
1:44.8	me mention him recently. Like when we talked about the writer John Green, Paul Farmer was a doctor
1:49.9	who founded an amazing global health organization called Partners in Health. He's the subject of a book
1:55.1	called Mountains Beyond Mountains, which focuses a lot on his work in Haiti. And which I'm going to
	...

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