For your holiday giving list

Help other people deal with the horrible cost of health care.

Dec 14, 2021

Hey there—

This newsletter is about to take a winter holiday break. You deserve one too. You’ve picked out some health insurance for next year! You could use some downtime.

I want you to drink eggnog with your loved ones, re-watch It’s a Wonderful Life, or whatever brings you comfort and/or joy — which is NOT stressing about the horrible cost of health care.

And you may be considering some year-end charitable giving — maybe even in someone else’s name as a gift? — and that could mean helping other people deal with the horrible cost of health care.

Of course, you are definitely welcome to support us as a way of doing that, but I also have a list for you, places that I respect a ton. We’ve featured their work on An Arm and a Leg.

We want to hear about your favorite orgs too. Don’t be shy!

Leave a comment

And even if you don’t have money to give, I think it may cheer you up to know what these folks are up to. Works for me.

Fucking-A, let’s go.

The folks at Dollar For lit up 2021 for me. In January, their founder went super-viral on TikTok with a recipe for crushing medical debt by leveraging a little-known fact: Most hospitals are legally obligated to offer charity care.

By mid-year, they had leveraged that viral fame to raise a small army of volunteers to level up everything they were doing.

An image of a bright purple background with an iPhone on the left side at an angle with the TikTok app pulled up with the words “I crush hospital debt. Test me” over an image of a man pointing at the camera. The text on the rest of the image reads: “remember this guy? After his viral TikTok, Jared Walker found a mini-army of volunteers who have logged charity care policies at 2700 hospitals and build an online system to crush a ton of medical debt”

Donate to Dollar For here.

The volunteer-driven Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium started by providing free COVID testing to Black Philadelphians in the early days of the pandemic. After the city made a disastrous mistake in early 2021 — entrusting vaccinations to a young white tech-bro-wanna-be...the Consortium stepped up and led Philadelphia to the highest Black vaccination rate of any U.S. city.

An image on a bright purple background with a map. The text reads: An Arm and a Leg, Pandemic check-in edition! Who’s been trying to cash in on COVID vaccinations? How did racism help them out? And some good news: How Black doctors have responded.

Donate to the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium here.

Remote Area Medical runs free pop-up clinics across the country. One of those sites played a role as the Ghost of Christmas Past in the tale of Wendell Potter.

This is an image with text on it. It reads: Wendell Potter’s story is A Christmas Carol for the 21st Century: with Scrooge as a health insurance bigwig who now wants to make amends.” Then, we see a photo of Wendell Potter with glasses on the right corner in a suit and tie. The text next to him is a quote from him, “What I used to do for a living was: mislead people into thinking that we had the best health care system in the world.”

Donate to Remote Area Medical here.

RIP Medical Debt pools money to buy up old medical debt and forgive it. By doing bulk transactions, they can take a $5 donation and use it to discharge $500 in debt. We featured their work in this 2019 episode.

This is a photo with texts and images. The text is at the top and reads: Christmas in July, A story with everything: Family. Community. Softball. Laughter. Tears. Punk Rock. John Oliver. A taco bar. Then there’s a collage of several images. Clockwise, there’s a photo of HBO’s John Oliver at his desk, next there’s a photo of a person throwing a baseball on a diamond, below those two is an image of three people all sitting next to each other, and then the last image is a person smoking a cigarette with the words reading: “feminism is the radical notion that women are people.”

Donate to RIP Medical Debt here.

MLK 50: Justice Through Journalism does powerful investigative reporting. After they exposed how the biggest hospital in Memphis was suing patients over unpaid bills, the hospital was shamed into dropping thousands of lawsuits and erasing almost $12 million in debt.

This is a photo of Wendi C. Thomas, on a blue background. The image also has some text. It says “Shame is a powerful motivator. The hospital didn’t look good, so they had to address it.” Wendi C. Thomas. Founder, MLK 50: Justice Through Journalism.

Donate to MLK 50 here.

How’s all that treating you? Pretty good, right? And one more thing about supporting us. Through December, any gift you make to us counts for double, thanks to a program called NewsMatch. You can chip in right here.

Thank you! OK, go drink that eggnog. I’ll catch you in January. We’ve got a LOT of work to do.

Till then, take care of yourself.

Dan

Syenite

Jan 1, 2022

Dan, thanks for these suggestions, and for another great year of your podcast! I've been following and supporting RIP Medical Debt since your podcast about them two years ago. It's so great to read their stories of the people they help free from medical debt. Thank you and happy 2022!

Expand full comment

First Aid Kit

Discussion about this post