Medicare is more broken than we thought

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Medicare Advantage plans vanishing

0:30Hey there. In the first week of October last year, 2025, a whole bunch of senior citizens in Minnesota got a letter with some bad news. A lot of changes coming in 2026. We know that at minimum 160,000 of you absolutely have to pay attention to this. Their health insurance through Medicare Advantage was going away. I was so mad. I was like, no, now what do I do? I look at my husband and say, now what? Folks like Aaron, who lives in small town Cambridge, Minnesota, were going to have to find a new plan by the end of Medicare's annual open enrollment period, which was about to start in a couple of weeks.

1:06Until now, Aaron had been on a plan from a local nonprofit insurance outfit called UCARE. And UCARE offered some of the most generous and affordable plans in Medicare Advantage. That's the version of Medicare operated by private health insurance companies. But UCARE was going belly up. The collapse of UCARE after 40 years in Minnesota has been swift and stunning. Callers jammed the phone lines at Minnesota's Aging Pathways hotline. That's the state agency that helps people with Medicare.

1:38Kelly Jo Greiner runs it. I don't know any other way to describe it other than total chaos. Our phones were ringing off the hook. Meanwhile, in the Twin Cities suburb of Maple Grove, an insurance broker named Allison Ebert had been getting ready for her busy season, making appointments with her usual clients. October 1st through October 14th, I always set my appointments with my clients. You know, I always joke I get paid in cookies and coffee because I go to their homes. We sit down. I know their families.

2:08I know their kids, their grandkids. The day open enrollment started, she got 47 calls from people she'd never met, people whose coffee and cookies she'd never tasted. That was new. And more were about to start calling because more letters were going out. Not just from UCARE. Other health insurance carriers were also dropping out of the area. UnitedHealthcare, Blue Cross, Aetna, Humana, all of them canceled Medicare Advantage plans in counties all over the state.

2:40Three counties were left with no Medicare Advantage plans at all. And this was not something that was just happening in Minnesota. Almost 3 million seniors across the country had plans in 2025 that were going to stop being offered to them in 2026. And that's because at their headquarters, insurance companies had done their calculations, assessed their risks, and decided that offering plans to those people was no longer going to be profitable enough.

3:14So seniors from Maine to California saw the number of available Medicare Advantage plans shrink by the dozen, leaving a lot of them confused and with fewer and often worse and more costly health insurance options. And it's part of a big new trend. These disappearing acts, they've been increasing in recent years. And insurance companies have already signaled more are coming. Major insurers have already announced intentions to dump plans that currently cover more than 2 million seniors.

3:50And we have spoken with folks in a dozen states, rural places like Vermont and North Dakota, states with rural and urban centers like Maryland and Minnesota, about how it all went down last year and what we can take away for this year. My colleague Emily Pizzacretta and our awesome summer intern Lynn Barbera made those calls. And Emily, you called that experience eye-opening. Uh, yeah. We already knew from previous reporting that people had problems with Medicare Advantage.

4:21And so at first, this story sort of seemed like one more thing people on Medicare Advantage had to worry about. But it turns out to be a lot more than that. What happened last year, and is about to happen again this fall, showed us big problems. Problems that affect everyone who's on Medicare, or hopes to one day be. There are layers to this. And we're going to peel them back. So, get ready for a big dose of Medicare.

4:48This is An Arm and a Leg, a show about why health care costs so freaking much and what we can maybe do about it.

Understanding traditional Medicare options

4:54I'm Dan Weissman. I'm a reporter. I like a challenge. So, our job on this show is to take one of the most enraging, terrifying, depressing parts of American life and bring you something entertaining, empowering, and useful. Emily, you know, a while back, we looked at problems with Medicare Advantage, and we should do a little recap. Yeah. Back then, we were taking our first deep look at Medicare itself. And as we said then, the whole thing kind of blew our minds.

5:25Before we did that story, I was under the impression that you wake up on your 65th birthday and never have to pay a medical bill again, never have to deal with health insurance companies again. In fact, that's the dream of Medicare for all. But it's not the reality of Medicare as it exists. For one thing, just signing up means making a dizzying number of choices. And that dream of never dealing with insurance companies again? No way. Turns out, they run a lot of Medicare. So, you could end up choosing among dozens of different plans offered by different insurance companies.

6:00But here's the most important part. When you sign up, you have to choose between what's now called traditional Medicare, run by the U.S. government, and Medicare Advantage plans, run by private insurance companies. And they both have downsides. Traditional Medicare doesn't cover everything. For outpatient medical care, you know, doctor visits, outpatient procedures, infusions, physical therapy, x-rays and MRIs, like you name it. But Medicare only pays 80% of the bill.

6:34And those other things can get so expensive, the remaining 20% can run to thousands of dollars that most seniors don't have. And so, if you want all that covered, and I mean, you do, you actually have to buy what's called a supplemental policy. People call them Medigap plans. They're offered by private insurance companies. You pay a premium owe. And wait, did I mention, you're already paying a premium to the feds for your Medicare. Yeah, like exactly how much depends on your financial situation, but most people pay just over $200 a month.

7:07And Medigap premiums, the private companies, are on top of that. And they vary a lot. They vary by what plan you pick and where you live. But the average, it's another $200 and some every month. And that number goes up every year. So, you're paying all that, and then you've still got another gap. Vision, dental, and hearing. Traditional Medicare doesn't cover them at all. So, Medigap plans generally don't cover them either. You know, the dark joke is that eyes and ears and teeth are luxury organs.

7:43Because who needs to see or hear or chew?

7:53So, those are some big gaps. And a lot of Medicare Advantage plans offer to fill those gaps. This card I'm holding in my hand, it's an example of an all-in-one Medicare Advantage membership card. And lots of them include what's missing. That card helps me with my vision costs, my dental costs. Some of them even subsidize the premium you'd be paying to the feds, even bringing it down to zero. So, you can see how appealing that is. And insurance companies hammer that appeal home with floods of TV ads, plus direct mail and phone calls and Facebook ads out the wazoo.

8:31None of which mention the downsides to Medicare Advantage, which are basically all the downsides we're all familiar with from dealing with insurance companies. Like, their network might not include your doctors and providers. It might not include very many providers near you at all. And once you find an in-network provider, the insurance company can make you jump through hoops like, you know, pre-authorization. Or they can deny a claim. And then you get to fight through an appeals process.

9:05I talked with a guy in Texas, Robert Wolpa. He's got HIV, pacemaker, other stuff. He said he felt like he was spending half his days on hold waiting to talk with badly paid, badly trained people. So, I'm 71. I just turned 71 in November. And I've got a little of the HIV cognizant crap. Like, my short-term memory is gone. And I think to myself, what have I got myself into? That's the thing. You can be 65 years old in totally decent shape, playing lots of pickleball or whatever, never seeing a doctor.

9:39But when you pick Medicare Advantage, most of the time, you're also choosing for an older, sicker version of yourself, a version of yourself who may need to see specialists and who may not have as much capacity to fight with insurance companies, which, I mean, most relatively young and healthy people have a hard enough time, right? So, this is where traditional Medicare starts to look much more appealing. Practically every provider takes it. Denials are really unusual, almost unheard of.

10:10But for most people, if you've chosen Medicare Advantage, it's like a no backseas situation. Like, you can still switch and sign up for traditional Medicare, but you may not be able to get a Medigap policy. For one thing, it may not be in your budget. Robert Wolpa got a quote, almost 500 bucks a month, like almost a third of his Social Security check. I said, OK, next option. And lots of people don't have an option at all. In most states, if you don't sign up at age 65, Medigap plans are allowed to reject you if you have pre-existing conditions.

10:48It's sort of shocking, actually, right? Like, the Affordable Care Act passes and makes it so that everybody with pre-existing conditions can get insurance no matter what. But it leaves out the people who might need that the most, who are 65 and older. That's the person who introduced us to Robert Wolpa and helped us understand this whole issue. It's Sarah Jane Tribble, a reporter with our pals at KFF Health News. She had just published her own story about the pitfalls of Medicare Advantage. And all of this stuff comes as a big surprise to a lot of folks, as Sarah Jane found out when she was reporting her story and talking about it with her friends.

11:22So with all of these advantages, all the marketing, all the gaps it fills, Medicare Advantage has grown by leaps and bounds in its 20-some years. At this point, the majority of seniors are on Medicare Advantage. So, OK, long recap, but that's what we knew a couple of years ago. And it turns out, based on what happened last fall and what's about to happen this year, the problems are way worse than we knew.

11:52In 90 days, thousands of Minnesotans will lose their Medicare Advantage coverage. Many major health care providers are dropping their Medicare Advantage plans in 2026.

Brokers lose commissions in Minnesota

12:03Yeah. So, Emily, what the heck happened? So, that local non-profit insurance company, YouCare, they went broke, and all their Medicare Advantage plans got pulled from the market. Pretty quickly after that, UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, and others sent breakup letters of their own to thousands of their beneficiaries. Lots of people turned to insurance brokers for help. But many brokers weren't calling them back, because things had started to go haywire for them, too.

12:33Insurance broker Allison Ebert told us she was used to getting paid in cookies and coffee. But this time around, she would mean that almost literally, because in the days leading up to open enrollment, she got an unusual call from her contact at UnitedHealthcare. She said, I just want to let you know, before you get the email, we're not paying commissions this year. No commissions. No payment from the insurance company for anyone she would enroll in their Medicare Advantage plans.

13:05Which is, for health insurance brokers, the whole business model. And my heart just sunk. That was the first phone call. And one by one, thereafter, all the major carriers, except for Alina Health Aetna, followed suit. Other brokers in Minnesota told me the same thing. I asked Allison, why do you think they cut commissions? And she says a rep for one of the big companies told her the ugly truth. With UCARE exiting the market, she said, let's face it, we don't want everybody that sunk UCARE on our plan.

13:42And so this is how we're going to curve enrollments. Allison got the message. Insurance companies didn't want to insure people who they thought, quote, sunk UCARE, meaning people who used health care, who filed claims, who cost money. If brokers didn't get commissions for selling plans to these folks, a lot fewer of them would sign up. Because they've always told us about 80% of the sales comes through brokers like us. Now, a few weeks later, it was October 15th.

14:16Open enrollment was starting, and her phone was ringing off the hook. 47 people on day one. And more every day after that. Plus, all her regular clients, the ones whose grandkids she knows by name. Allison had to decide what to do. Could she afford to help all those people for free? I have kids. I mean, I deserve to get paid. I need to put gas in my tank to go to these people's homes. But Allison didn't think it was right to leave people hanging. I left a message on my answering machine saying, you know, due to the fact that we're not getting paid this season,

14:52A lot of brokers left the market, and I'm just returning calls as they come. But just beware that it might take me a couple weeks to get back to you. Instead of going to everyone's house, she set up office hours at a coffee shop to be able to see as many people as possible. Meanwhile, Kelly Jo Greiner and her colleagues at the state's Medicare hotline were scrambling, too. We had wait times of two hours. Nobody wants to wait for even 10 minutes, let alone two hours.

15:25She and her team had to improvise. We have staff that don't usually do Medicare counseling. They help with, like, long-term care in other areas. And we even put those folks on the phones to help. And she wrangled a weekly spot on Fox 9 in the Twin Cities to answer big questions. Medicare Monday is what we're calling it. A lot of changes coming in 2026. Kelly Jo, thanks for joining us. Well, thank you. I'm glad to be here again. All right. Well, let's roll. Kelly Jo told viewers, the most important thing is to be proactive.

15:57If you don't do anything, the system will put you into traditional Medicare, but without a Medigap plan. Oh, and by the way, she told them, your drug plan will probably disappear, too, unless you sign up for a new one. So, she said, the good news is, as far as it goes, right now you have a choice. And it's just like the one you had when you were 65. You get to basically start over if you want and get a Medigap plan, even if you have a pre-existing condition. This is a special situation.

16:27They can't reject you. And once you're on, they can't tell you which doctors to see. Almost every doctor in the country takes traditional Medicare. And for many people, that is a huge advantage, because we have a lot of snowbirds here that go south for the winter. But she says most people she talked with decided they just couldn't afford those Medigap premiums. They were stuck with Medicare Advantage. Only now, they had fewer and crummier Medicare Advantage plans to choose from.

16:58Also, they were more expensive than they were used to. Kelly Jo says a lot of people had been on plans with no monthly premium. But now, all of those plans were gone. And so they ended up having to switch to a plan with a premium. And in a lot of cases, without some of those extra benefits that Kelly Jo says are a big draw, like discounts on groceries or free gym memberships, which is a feature called Silver Sneakers. And I cannot even tell you how many people called us about Silver Sneakers.

17:29They were so upset about that change. So people ended up paying more than they were used to and getting less.

17:37OK, so to recap, some Medicare Advantage plans disappeared. Yes. The remaining plans were not great. Right. And most people chose them anyway because they couldn't afford Medigap. Correct. And we can expect more of the same this year and for who knows how many years ahead. So Medicare Advantage is getting shakier even while it keeps growing. Coming right up, how the dynamics behind all of this add up to trouble for all of Medicare

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18:43Northwest. We get into the stories that hit your wallet and our region. Listen now on the KUOW app or wherever you listen.

Rising Medigap premiums and risk pools

18:52This season of An Arm and a Leg is a co-production of Public Road Productions and KFF Health News. That's a nonprofit newsroom covering health issues in America. The reporters are amazing. You're about to hear from one of them. We're honored to be their colleagues.

19:08So, Kelly Jo Greiner told us lots of folks who lost their Medicare Advantage plans, they just couldn't afford Medigap supplements. And as we've been learning, that's been one of the big dynamics behind the growth of Medicare Advantage in the first place. Our colleague Julie Appleby found recently that dynamic is getting starker. Julie is a senior correspondent with our pals at KFF Health News. I cover all things health insurance, pretty much, from the Affordable Care Act to Medicare,

19:38other kinds of health insurance programs, that kind of thing. Earlier this year, Julie got a call from a broker in Illinois. And he was telling me that more than like 80 of his customers were enrolled in a Medicare supplement. A specific plan, one that usually had low premiums. But they suddenly raised their rates by 45%. And he said, in my 49 years of doing business as a broker, I've never seen a premium increase be effective immediately on everyone. And so I thought, hey, I'm going to start looking into this.

20:11She found some good data from a company called Telos Actuarial, which showed this price hike was part of a trend. There were increases going on kind of throughout the industry. On average, the data showed premiums on Medigap went up almost 17% from the previous year. Not as high as that one plan with a 45% increase, but still nothing to sneeze at. Brokers and other experts told Julie that kind of increase used to be almost unheard of. But for the last bunch of years, it's become a new normal.

20:42Julie sees a connection between that and the growth of Medicare Advantage. To understand it and why everything about Medicare could be getting shakier and shakier, Julie is going to introduce us to a key term, risk pool. It's part of how insurance prices get set. Because insurance is a giant pool, right? We all are in the pool and everybody kind of shares the cost. So the insurance company has to sit down and try to figure out, well, gee, I've got this pool of people. How sick are they? How often are they going to go to the doctor? How often are they going to be hospitalized?

21:12And then calculate out, okay, so what might that cost? So a lot depends on who's in the risk pool for any given plan. If Medigap plans are more expensive than Medicare Advantage, but they provide better coverage, then who's going to choose the Medigap? People who think they're going to need that better coverage. Sicker people. And with millions of people getting the chance at do-overs because their Medicare Advantage plans got nuked, these Medigap insurers have a new bunch of customers who, it seems reasonable

21:43to think, may be sicker. So these carriers are then having to think, wow, I'm taking all these people on in this region, so I'm going to have to raise my premiums to cover what might be those expected costs. And as premiums grow and grow, what we could see is a kind of vicious cycle. Because as new people turn 65, they're looking at Medigap premiums that are harder and harder to afford. So more and more people are attracted to Medicare Advantage. I spoke with a researcher named Laura Skopak.

22:15She studies Medicare at the Urban Institute, an economic and social policy think tank. Here's how she put it. If this trend continues with Medigap prices driving more people to Medicare Advantage. We're going to see a traditional Medicare that is sicker and wealthier, which is sort of a weird combination, but it's going to be sort of the sickest people that really need good access to specialists, want to be able to go to the cancer center, any sort of doctor they want to go to, and the people that can afford Medigap.

22:46Like the sicker you are, the more you need this. And the more people who need it, the more expensive the supplements will be. Right. The risk pool just keeps on worsening. So expect Medicare Advantage to keep growing. And as Laura points out, getting more expensive. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission says we spend about 14% more for everyone who chooses Medicare Advantage over traditional Medicare. And that was really not the point of the Medicare Advantage program, right?

23:16It was supposed to use sort of private sector processes to lower costs in Medicare, and it has not done that. In fact, insurance companies are under increasing scrutiny for overcharging the government for Medicare Advantage. The feds have been trying to impose new rules to cut down on those extra profits. All very technical stuff, which we could devote a whole episode to. Maybe we should. Yeah. And the crackdown may have played a role in insurance companies pulling some of these plans off the market.

23:46And they say they're going to keep yanking more plans off the market unless they get more federal dollars. They're saying that their costs are going up for paying claims, which is probably true. And they point to market exits and other issues as like, we need a pay bump here to stay in the market. All of this, pulling plans off the market, reducing benefits, trying to control who enrolls in their plans, all this stuff is likely to keep happening.

24:17So we should talk about what it looks like on the ground and how seniors can navigate all these changes.

Senior federation helps navigate changes

24:25Remember Erin in Cambridge, Minnesota? What happened to her really exemplifies how this kind of thing can play out and how we can support each other. So Erin had gotten kicked off her plan when the whole enterprise behind it, UCARE, collapsed. And Erin had been really happy with UCARE for the four years she was on one of their Advantage plans. You call their customer service and they are very helpful. I loved it. She had access to specialists. A thoracic, a neurologist, a urologist, a nephrology, an ENT specialist.

24:59Erin had suffered four heart attacks in her late 50s. Because she couldn't work, she started getting Social Security and Medicare early when she was 58. She doesn't really remember how she ended up picking Medicare Advantage over traditional Medicare. But it was working for her. That is, until they pulled the rug out from underneath her. I did not want them to go anywhere. I heard that. I was just in tears. I was so mad. I was like, no, now what do I do? I look at my husband and say, now what? And she says her husband had the answer immediately.

25:31Well, we'll just call Desi. We'll just call Desi. Wait a minute. Who's Desi? Oh, you gotta meet Desi. I'm Desi Ponick, and I work at the Seven County Senior Federation here in Moro, Minnesota. That's a member-led organization of seniors in Eastern and Central Minnesota who came together to advocate for themselves and to help each other with transportation and other stuff seniors need, including signing up for and dealing with Medicare. I met Desi and her boss, Lisa Krohn, the Federation's director, as they were gearing up for this

26:02year's annual enrollment period. It can't be as bad as it was last year. Yeah. Yeah. We'll find out soon. Yeah. Oh, God. Yep. Hold on to your hat. Yep. They're still dealing with the fallout from last year. This is Lisa. There's still quite a few people who show up who are calling now who don't realize that they haven't had a plan all year saying, I just don't have anything because my old plan left. Well, I wasn't really paying attention to the mail they were sending me kind of a thing. Some of those people only found out when they got a bill in the mail or when they tried

26:36to pick up a prescription and had to pay out of pocket because they didn't have a drug plan anymore. Luckily, Erin got the news before it was too late. She and her husband called Desi, and Desi helped them enroll in a new Medicare Advantage plan, which Erin says isn't as good. Right now, I've got $1,700 out of pocket going to a pair of hearing aids. She's not a fan of the customer service, and she says she had to stop taking one of her preventative medications because her drug plan changed. Desi and Lisa are operating very much at the ground level, helping people like Erin, but

27:13they definitely have thoughts about the big picture, especially the stark choice between Medicare Advantage and traditional Medicare. Original Medicare is that thing you've been waiting your whole life to get. It's good everywhere. And once you're in, you're in. But it's become too expensive for most people. Meanwhile, Medicare Advantage can really limit people's access to care. So looking for a middle ground between those, it's, it's, there, there should be better choices, frankly, instead of such extreme ones.

27:43Extreme is a really good word for that. I agree. Extreme meaning there's a big hole in one and there's too many. Restrictions on the other. But all the millions we're dumping into advertising and these private companies, that could have filled the holes on original Medicare a long time ago. And that's just antithetical to the function and the existence of the insurance industry, which, like the monarchy, maybe we can stop believing in. I'm revealing myself as a single payer Medicare for All advocate.

28:16But we need better Medicare, frankly, you know, it's always been shortchanged.

Medicare for all proposals discussed

28:20Dan, speaking of Medicare for All. Yeah, we really shouldn't do an episode like this without mentioning it, especially because it's been coming up so much in this year's election season. Like in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary and Medicare for All was his number one pitch. Yes, we really can guarantee health care in this country. Yes, we really can do it while spending a lot less and getting a lot more if our health

28:51care doesn't still fund tens of millions of dollars in health care CEO salaries on top of it. People like Lisa and Abdul El-Sayed think of Medicare for All as a way to also plug holes in existing Medicare. Well, OK, huh. I mean, one thing I am really tuning into with this episode is that all these big gaps in Medicare are actually driven by the fact that all of Medicare, our big public benefit, is actually set up so that it requires private insurance companies to make a profit in order

29:23for it to function, like whether they're selling Medicare Advantage plans or Medicare policies. OK, but then how do Medicare for All advocates say that spreading Medicare to everybody makes the math actually work better? Well, it's all about that term Julie Appleby introduced us to, risk pool, how risky the people you're insuring, the pool, are as a whole, meaning how much health care they need on average. The calculations change a lot when the pool is everyone, including people who are 25 as

29:56well as 65 and 95, and when tax money funds health care directly instead of filtering it through private health insurance companies to administer and also take a profit. In fact, a recent study out of Yale estimates that Medicare for All, that is a Medicare that is completely void of private health insurance companies, that would reduce annual health expenditures by $1 trillion every year. OK, and that's not just taking insurance companies out of Medicare.

30:27It's taking them out of the whole U.S. health care system. Right. In the meantime, some politicians in Washington are talking about tweaks, big and small, to just Medicare itself. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders... Like Mr. Medicare for All. Yeah. In the meantime, he says we should extend traditional Medicare to cover vision, hearing, and dental. He introduced a bill in the Senate to do just that. And Oregon Senator Ron Wyden recently introduced a bill that would put an out-of-pocket max on traditional Medicare.

30:57That way, people wouldn't need supplements as much, and Medicare Advantage also wouldn't look as tempting. Both of those ideas would mean putting more federal money towards traditional Medicare. Yeah. And that doesn't seem like something Congress is likely to do anytime soon. But on the other hand, what this whole story shows is this is going to cost us either way. Like, either we put more dollars into traditional Medicare or we keep paying higher prices collectively and individually. And, you know, as for the here and now, if you have Medicare Advantage but you don't have

31:32a Desi or Lisa to call, Emily, they gave you a breakdown of what you need to know. Yep. Here's their first piece of advice. Open every piece of mail from your insurance company. That's where you're going to find out whether your plan is being canceled or where you might find out they're trying to auto-enroll you into a new plan, which might not be the best one for you. The past couple of years, we've had plans that end a specific plan but will auto-enroll the enrollee into another plan in the same company.

32:04Crosswalking. Yes. So that's a big deal. Pay attention to your mail. You're going to get stuck with huge premiums if you just let it roll. And find someone to talk to. Remember Kelly Jo, who runs the Medicare hotline for Minnesota? Every state actually has one of those agencies. They're called SHIP, S-H-I-P, State Health Insurance Assistance Program. Google your state, SHIP, and Medicare, and you should find it. And if you can't get through, there's always insurance brokers.

32:35DESE has some advice on measuring up whether an insurance broker is trustworthy. Ask them if they sell every product available to you in your area. That's one of the biggest things. I think that a lot of people just assume they're going to go to a broker or an agent and they're going to get the full scope. And that's not necessarily true. You might want to look for someone who sells Medigap supplements as well as Medicare Advantage plans. Someone who does that may be less inclined to push you into whatever's paying them the highest commissions. Word of mouth is a big deal for a lot of people.

33:06So asking your friends, your neighbors, who did you work with? Are you happy? Are you unhappy? What was the experience like? Talking to your friends and neighbors. It's like, we got to rely on each other. Yeah, which is why I'm kind of obsessed with this senior federation thing. People banding together to share information and resources to navigate this ongoing mess. Desi and Lisa's group has been operating since 1975. There actually used to be a robust network of groups like this across the state.

33:37Theirs is the last one, but Desi says they're going strong. We've got our beautiful community and our thrift stores that keep our doors open and allow us to give that good information out, whether it's what people want to hear or not. So it went by kind of fast, but I think I heard her say thrift stores. Is that right? Yep. They have a side hustle. We run two thrift stores, the one more time stores, which give us financial independence. So we're not dependent on just memberships and just counseling fees or service fees. That's awesome. Yeah.

34:07I'm dying to go to those thrift stores. I saw it on the website. I was like, did you see that? We won Minnesota's best thrift store. Stop it. I've done it. That's so cool. Oh my God. Put on by the Minnesota Star Team. Yes. There's a popularity. Amazing. Wow.

34:26Wow. For sure. Emily, thank you so much for all this amazing reporting. So here's where we landed. Medicare is so much more broken than we knew. And we already knew it was kind of a confusing mess with a lot of holes. Fixing it is going to require a huge lift. The kind of thing that hasn't seemed like a political possibility. And everybody's going to have big differences of opinion about how a fix should work. Like there are people who think the government shouldn't be involved in health care at all.

34:59And meanwhile, we've got what we've got. We've got each other. And you just never know what might be possible. Next time on An Arm and a Leg, we're going to hear about what might be the most radical health care experiment since Medicare itself. And the two guys, a Democrat and a Republican, who made it happen. Till then, take care of yourself.

Credits and sponsor acknowledgments

35:34This episode of An Arm and a Leg was produced by Emily Pisecretta, with help from our summer intern, Lynn Barbera, and me, Dan Weissman, and edited by Ellen Weiss. Isabella Kulkarni provided additional production help. Reporting for this story was supported in part by Arnold Ventures. Listeners like you are our biggest source of support. We need you more than ever. If you like what you're hearing and want it to continue, head to armandalegshow.com

36:06slash support. Adam Raimunda is our audio wizard. Our music is by Dave Weiner and Blue Dot Sessions. Amanda Boyd is our operations manager. Bea Bosco is our consulting director of operations. And Arm and a Leg is produced in partnership with KFF Health News. That's a national newsroom producing in-depth journalism about health issues in America. And a core program at KFF, an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Zach Dyer is senior audio producer at KFF Health News. He's editorial liaison to this show.

36:37And Arm and a Leg is distributed by KUOW, Seattle's NPR news station. Thanks to the Institute for Nonprofit News for serving as our fiscal sponsor. They allow us to accept tax-exempt donations. You can learn more about INN at INN.org. Finally, thank you to everybody who supports this show financially. I'm serious. Listeners like you are our biggest source of funding. You can join in anytime at armandalegshow.com slash support. That's armandalegshow.com slash support.

37:11Thank you so much. Thanks for listening.

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