Barbara Faubion got up every day psyched to go to work—which she says puzzled her friends. “They’d go, ‘You love your job?!? You spend your whole day talking to an insurance company. Are you kidding me?’” She wasn’t kidding. And she's got lessons ...

Steve Benasso is an HR director who hates seeing people getting taken advantage of. So he fights off weird medical bills and bogus insurance denials for those colleagues. "I am a bulldog. I do it every month." On this episode, he tells us how...

If you need medical care, it's like you've entered a casino, playing for your financial life, with the deck stacked against you. Lucky for us, we get insight — and tips the dealer WON'T tell you— from ace reporter Celia Llopis-Jepsen. ...

There's no time like a pandemic to (a) learn to fight back against the awful cost of health care. And (b) have a good time doing it. Yep. Let’s go.

We wrap up our COVID-19 popup season with stories from three folks with very different takes on what we've learned so far about what the pandemic is costing us.

In early April, Katelyn was in a financial bind: Home sick with COVID, she hadn't been paid in weeks. And bills were due. "My landlord is kinda beating down my door right now," she said. She made it through—with with hard-won tips for a...

A listener, who has worked in health insurance for decades, wrote in. "I have listened to all the episodes in this podcast, and there are times I come away feeling bad working for the insurance company." We talked. She had useful advice for ...

You've probably noticed: The U.S. economy is crashing. Something you may not have noticed, that may sound really weird: Almost half of that economic devastation comes from just one sector. And that sector? It's health care.

Anna's insurance company said it would pay 100 percent for COVID-related testing. And then they left her to pay a giant bill. She got help, thanks to a viral tweet, but her story exposes big loopholes in consumer protections. We learn how not to f...

Ryan Gamlin spent a decade working on the financial side of health care, before going to medical school. Now, as an anesthesiologist in Los Angeles, he’s on the front lines fighting COVID-19, an experience he describes as “scary, in a way that I never ...