Medicare for All

The United States is unique among industrialized nations. Lucky for us, we can accumulate medical debt! Most industrialized and some developing nations have national healthcare programs that guarantee care to their residents. But we in the richest nation in the world have the freedom to get insurance through the free market, and go into debt when it doesn’t cover the care we need! USA USA USA! Acc...

Usually on the Medicare for All Podcast, we talk about people who want healthcare but can’t get it, but today we’re talking about people getting healthcare they have specifically refused: folks who have been involuntarily committed. For plenty of our listeners, the idea of being held against your will at a psychiatric institution feels like a nightmare from another time – something out of gothic f...

If there’s one thing everyone is talking about these days, it’s JD Vance’s affinity for couches. But if there are two things everyone is talking about, it’s Vance’s couches and Project 2025. You may be wondering, what is this mysterious project, and what does it have to do with me? Well, it turns out, a lot! Project 2025 is the right-wing map to a terrifying future, and if its proponents have thei...

It’s our 100th episode folks, and we are celebrating the only way we know how – by sharing our predictions of the grim, apocalyptic future that surely awaits us if we fail to get our healthcare system together! That’s right, we’re talking about the next pandemic, and if experts are right, it’s coming sooner than we think. In addition to several somewhat less familiar pathogens on the rise this sum...

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! For activists in the movement to make Medicare for All a reality, this is the week when we gather to plot, scheme, and kvetch. Welcome to the 2024 Annual Medicare for All Strategy Conference, “Healthcare Beyond the Ballot Box,” organized by Healthcare NOW! For those of you who are attending the conference right now, you are getting a sneak preview of...

We are in the middle of a resurgence of organized labor in the US. From Amazon workers to auto workers and grad students to baristas at Starbucks, everyone is getting in on the action! One of the big reasons workers are so hot to get that union card is because of… you guessed it, healthcare! Today we’re going to be talking union healthcare plans – how they work and how workers have managed to use...

The U.S. is wrestling with a massive mental health crisis – impacting young people in particular. Half of young adults and one-third of all adults report that they always feel anxious or have often felt anxiety in the past year. One-third of respondents could not get the mental health services they needed. Why? 80% say they couldn’t afford the cost and more than 60% said that shame and stigm...

We hear it over and over again – the private sector just does it better. Whether we’re talking education or healthcare or our criminal justice system, the default Republican (and sometimes Democratic) talking point is that competition in the marketplace allows the best ideas and best people (Elon Musk, lookin at you) to rise to the top and lead us to a utopian future (sponsored by Meta). But then...

Occasional fistfights aside, most of our legislators make the choice to use their words when they’re angry, and a lot of those words go into public letters they write to presidents, officials, and even each other. Despite the fact that no one else in this country has written or read a letter in decades, the public comment letter is still popular with politicians, who have elevated this obscure lit...

Here at the Medicare for All Podcast, we love calling out all the bad actors in our healthcare system – greedy insurance companies, soul-less CEOs in Big Pharma,profit-hungry “non-profit hospitals”, and all our favorite villains. Mostly, we look at the ways those predators target sick people and poor people for exploitation, but today we’re looking at what happens when they start fighting each oth...

Just this Monday, we celebrated Martin Luther King Day, a tribute to one of the great leaders of the movement for racial justice – but something that often gets forgotten in the flurry of MLK quotes that become memes this time of year is that equity in healthcare was a crucial part of King’s vision. Throughout his career in activism, he often stated his conviction that “Of all the forms of inequal...

It’s that time again folks… time for a Mailbag Episode! We reached out to our whole audience and all our supporters to find the pressing questions on everyone’s mind. Or at least we would have if Gillian hadn’t been too busy eating turkey to email our list. So instead, Gillian reached out personally to some of our superfans (anyone in her contact list who had previously admitted to listening to th...

Open enrollment. Deductible. Coinsurance. HMO. Indemnity plan. If you’re listening this far, you probably have a migraine already. Understanding the language of the health insurance industry, let alone selecting a health insurance plan, can be confusing, frustrating, and disheartening. But never fear – we are here to give you a crash course on everything you need to know about your insurance...

If you’ve ever had an experience with the American healthcare system, you’ve probably walked away thinking, “Why can’t we have nice things? Or even basic human things??” We get stuck on gurneys sitting in ER hallways, waiting hours for care; we skip other basic needs like food and housing to pay for the healthcare we can’t skip; or we wait for months for preauthorizations from our health insurance...

Just over a month ago we lost Bob Barker, the man who taught us all about the brutal nature of capitalism one pricing game at a time. Now, thanks to the I nflation Reduction Act, the federal government is going to be playing a role in determining the prices for some of our favorite products . No, we’re not talking about cars or family vacations to the Bahamas – we’re talking about the prescription...

With all the threats facing our country – climate change, a predatory economy, corporations buying our elections, and the overt move towards fascism among the far right – you would think that politicians would be laser-focused on the existential crises descending upon us. But instead, politicians in the US are devoting a considerable amount of their energy these days to an all-out assault on the r...

Almost every patient in America has had a frustrating experience in a hospital setting where we feel like we’re on a medical conveyor belt that moves WAY too slowly. We sit for too long in a waiting room; then our nurses or doctors speak with us very briefly; we might feel more like we’re filling out an online survey than we’re being listened to; then we might have more waiting; and then we’re pus...

Today we bring you behind the scenes into our office at Healthcare NOW. Just like the TV show The Office, we have our hijinks and wacky characters, including some very smart interns! They have prepped some of their burning questions for this episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnG1C8DOZVY First, from Intern Noah from Boston College: In your opinion, what is the most effective way to organize/...

It’s summer, the sun is blazing, and we only have one thing on our minds – the upcoming thirtieth anniversary of the high-octane, expertly paced thriller The Fugitive , originally released August 6, 1993 starring Harrison Ford. Oh, and Medicare for All. We’re always thinking about Medicare for All. Now that we mention it, isn’t it funny how if we had a single-payer healthcare system, The Fug...

As Tom Petty taught us all in the 1980s, Waiting is the Hardest Part. That’s even more true when you’re waiting to see a doctor for a problem that needs attention. Anyone who has ever tried to secure a doctor’s appointment in this country knows that a) it’s going to be harder than scoring Taylor Swift tickets and b) you are going to face serious delays before you get your care. In this episode, we...

Usually we spend our time on this podcast talking about our for-profit healthcare system and why we need to make healthcare a public good, but in this episode we’re taking a detour into another privatized American system that should be public: our railroads! Just like in US healthcare, private companies are falling asleep at the switch on managing our railroads, and just like in the healthcare sys...

Virtually all Americans know that our healthcare system is broken and that it’s working against us. But who is the villain in this story? Who is responsible for maintaining this healthcare system, and using it to profit off of patients? If we had to round up the usual suspects in a lineup, we’d probably end up with health insurance companies and big pharma. But what about hospitals? Many people li...

If you missed our annual Single Payer Strategy Conference, it’s your lucky day. Today we share a conference presentation all about the impact of Private Equity on healthcare (spoiler alert: it’s not good.) Our guests are Eagan Kemp , Health Care Policy Advocate at Public Citizen ; Rachel Madley , Health Policy Advisor to Medicare for All Act chief author Representative Pramila Jayapal...

When kids turn two or three years old, they learn to tell what is called a “primary lie,” which is lying without much sophistication or awareness of how the listener will perceive the lie (hint: you completely failed to fool your parents). But when we turn four, we learn to tell “secondary lies,” which take into account the listener’s likely reaction, and are more plausible. When we turn seven or...

Back in 2008, the TV show Breaking Bad asked a question that is still on a lot of Americans’ minds: How far would you go to pay for medical care? In Breaking Bad, the main character ends up building a meth empire to pay for his cancer treatment, which is a solution we don’t necessarily endorse, but you do what you have to do. Today we’re going to be talking about real life (slightly less dramatic)...