Employer-sponsored health insurance covers 165.6 million Americans. It’s the default. For lots of workers, it’s a key reason to accept a job offer, or to stay in a job.

But that system is slowly imploding. As premiums have grown explosively — the average employer plan now prices out at $27,000 for family coverage — businesses have passed more costs onto their workers.

And, as STAT News reporter Bob Herman wrote in July: America's Small Businesses are Giving Up on Health Insurance.

That story kicked off a series, Out of Pocket, Out of Reach, with a subtitle that says it all: “How America's Employer-Based Healthcare System Continues to Crumble in Slow Motion.”

Bob covers the business of health care for STAT News. His rigorous investigative journalism recently earned him the coveted title of “UnitedHealth’s least favorite reporter.”

He joins us to unpack how the skyrocketing cost of providing health insurance is affecting companies large and small.

And he talks with Dan about how the hidden nature of those costs obscures our understanding of just how much the larger health care system is squeezing out of us, eroding our wages and even our freedom to leave crappy jobs.

Here's a transcript of this episode.

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We’re bringing back a favorite episode from 2023 that raises a question as relevant as ever: What if we had a decent, publicly-funded health system, available to everybody, with or without insurance?

We’ve got one, says Dr. Ricardo Nuila. It’s where he works.

And it could be a model for the whole country. Yes, really.

That’s the pitch he made in his 2023 book, The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine. It’s a love letter to Houston’s Ben Taub hospital, and an argument for bringing Ben Taub’s model, efficient, innovative, and cheap, to the rest of the country.

And if that seems unlikely in today’s political climate, well: Ben Taub’s wild origin story was plenty unlikely too.

That story takes us to the 1960s, when Dutch novelist and playwright Jan de Hartog moved to Houston. He fell in love with the bustling, futuristic home of NASA and the Astrodome.

But he also discovered the city’s dreadful underside: a neglected charity hospital where largely African-American patients are left to seek health care in unsanitary and unsafe, hellish, conditions.

De Hartog and a group of Quaker volunteers waged a campaign to change that, and eventually found an unlikely ally who brought it over the finish line.

The People’s Hospital is a heck of a book. We might want to start a book group someday, just to talk about it. If you want to grab a copy, here’s a link. (Or: Audiobook, or ebook.)

Here's a transcript of this episode.

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

And of course we’d love for you to support this show.

Support the show: https://armandalegshow.com/support/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last May, just a few months into the second Trump Administration, changes to federal health programs were happening at a bewildering pace. We brought in KFF Heath News Chief Washington Correspondent Julie Rover to help give us — and you — a big picture look at what some changes would mean.

A year-and-change later, we wanted to check back in. We talk about the “crumbling Jenga tower” of public health infrastructure, the fallout from cuts to Obamacare subsidies, and Medicaid, and what Julie sees happening in 2028 and beyond (including a whisper of hope.)

Plus, we get an update on Julie’s growing t-shirt collection and a new series she’s starting on her health policy news podcast What the Health?

You can read a transcript of this episode here.

Want to dive deeper into those state Medicaid cuts we talked about? Julie did a whole episode of What the Health? about them. Listen here.

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Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.

Of course we’d love for you to support this show.

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