Episodes

We’re proud to serve as a forum for big health care policy discussions and the latest one may be the most heated ever. Our guests debate the pros and cons of Medicare for All, which would be a single-payer national health program that would fully cover medical care for all Americans (and make most private insurance illegal). It’s become a major issue in many midterm election campaigns.  

This episode occurs as a new poll shows 43% of Americans would support a proposal to establish a “Medicare for All” program, according to the Axios-Ipsos American Health Index. Two in three Americans back the view that the federal government should be willing to spend more tax dollars to lower health care costs for Americans.

Our guests are:

• Robert Goldberg, Ph.D., with the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, who says Medicare for All would cost trillions of dollars a year even as the government currently can’t run Medicare without a deficit.  
• Dr. Sanjeev Sriram, with Physicians for a National Health Program, who says taxes would need to go up, but we’re already being taxed for health care through employer plans.

Despite the battle lines, the guests find room to agree. Click now to learn about their common ground.

What’s worrying voters? Health costs are tied with gas prices for the most important affordability issue, according to a new KFF Health poll. The research found that voters trust Democrats over Republicans to deal with health care costs by a nearly two-to-one margin. This is the backdrop for our Reporters’ Roundtable with the journalists who cover health care news from the nation’s capital. They are: 

• Julie Rovner, the chief Washington correspondent and host of the KFF Health News weekly podcast, “What the Health?”
• Nathaniel Weixel, who covers the intersection of health policy and politics for “The Hill.”

Hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter ask them to weigh in on the effects of what Republicans call the “One Big Beautiful Bill” and its health care cuts while some Democrats look to roll back those cuts and others consider Medicare for All as a solution.

The environment for the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy is moving quickly. 

In mid-September, the Food & Drug Administration held a hearing about potential future therapeutic use of psychedelics in supervised and supportive settings. 

Psychedelic psychotherapy combines mind-altering substances like psilocybin or MDMA with talk therapy; researchers are studying it as a potential treatment for challenging mental health conditions. 

Rachel Yehuda,  Ph.D., is the director of the Parsons Research Center for Psychedelic Healing at the Icahn School of Medicine, which is part of the Mount Sinai Health System. She says this approach can serve as a “heart opener” and helps patients overcome avoidance they may have in discussing trauma and past life events. “It puts you in a frame of mind where you do allow yourself to go there…you become quite curious…you become remarkably nonjudgmental about yourself.”   

Yehuda joins hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter to answer questions about the long-term benefits of this approach as well as its risks and medical contraindications.

This week is the 17th anniversary of our first “Conversations on Health Care” and our guests have been part of the community health center movement before we even started our interviews.

They have the battle scars that prove they know how to fight and win on behalf of community health centers. Now, they’re rallying the ranks and encouraging them to take on new challenges.

The guests are:

  *   Rear Admiral, U.S. Public Health Service (ret.), Richard Bohrer, former director of the federal Health Center Program

  *   James W. Hunt, Jr., Ph.D., former president and CEO, Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers

The latest data show that nearly 1 in 7 Americans, including 1 in 3 in rural America, has relied on community health centers in recent years. But Medicaid cuts threaten their viability.

Bohrer and Hunt join hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter to explain how they beat back funding threats in the 1980s and how the movement should handle inevitable leadership and operational transitions.

Hunt also discusses his new book, “If You’ve Seen One…,” which covers his six decades of effort to expand access to community health centers.

The common speculation has been that GLP-1s would ultimately save patients and the entire health care system millions of dollars by reducing waistlines and the associated costs with obesity. But research found that during the first year, patients accumulated about $6,500 in GLP-1 spending, while their other medical spending increased by about $585. Much of that increase came from outpatient care, including monitoring and management associated with treatment.

Indiana University economist Kosali Simon, Ph.D. joins us to explain the data and discuss when these medications used for type 2 diabetes and obesity might actually result in savings.

Hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter also ask her about her other research projects, ranging from the opioid epidemic to health insurance. Simon says she’s motivated by the belief that “people can be part of studying health care in order to improve health in ways that don’t involve actual clinical care.”

“I’m quite frankly, flabbergasted…”

That’s the reaction of Dr. Reed Tuckson to the White House’s recent decision on childhood vaccines. An Executive Order has called for separating the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into three different single-disease shots and giving all childhood immunizations at separate appointments when possible.

Tuckson is the co-founder of both the Black Coalition Against COVID and the Coalition for Trust in Health and Science.

“This effort, on top of other efforts, deliberately tried to make it difficult for us to have the American child vaccinated against preventable illnesses…illnesses that are serious in their consequences, including and up to death.”

Tuckson’s remedy is for patients to take their questions to their health care provider and for those providers to listen and provide evidence-based answers. He stresses that now is the best time to get the flu and COVID vaccines, especially because the flu season last year was unusually severe and ranked among the worst in decades.

Tuckson also talks to hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter about the latest insights into how to effectively communicate about diagnosing and treating Long COVID.