A Health Podyssey
by Health Affairs · Health Affairs
Weekly podcast from the journal Health Affairs featuring authors of recent health policy research. Conversations cover Medicare and Medicaid, insurance coverage, drug pricing, care delivery and health equity, showing how researchers frame their questions and what their findings imply for policy.
More resources on Healthcare Systems
Advancing Surgical Care Podcast
Interviews and updates from the Ambulatory Surgery Center Association covering reimbursement, accreditation, staffing, and regulatory change in outpatient surgical facilities. Listeners get a working picture of how ASCs are run and what policy shifts affect them.
The Doctor's Lounge
Podcast in which Dutch Rojas and practicing physicians, including neurosurgeons, a cardiologist and a spine surgeon, discuss healthcare policy. Topics include Medicare payment reform, certificate-of-need laws, corporate consolidation and physician autonomy, showing how policy decisions shape clinical practice and patient care.
An Arm and a Leg
Journalism podcast by Dan Weissmann, co-produced with KFF Health News, investigating why US health care is so expensive. Episodes explain insurance design, hospital pricing, surprise billing and debt collection, and show listeners practical ways to challenge bills and navigate coverage.
Tradeoffs
Nonprofit health-policy journalism that translates peer-reviewed research into episodes on coverage, costs, Medicaid, and delivery reform. Each episode carries a transcript and cited sources, and a scientific advisory committee of academic health economists vets the reporting.
Priced Out: The Economic and Ethical Costs of American Health Care
A health economist's account of why American care costs so much, arguing that prices rather than utilization drive spending, and forcing the prior ethical question of how much care a society owes people who cannot pay. It reframes cost as a distributional and ethical choice, which is the mental model that survives whatever the current policy fight is.
The Social Transformation of American Medicine
Pulitzer-winning history tracing how American physicians won professional sovereignty and how hospitals, insurers, and corporate chains hardened into an industry, explaining why national health insurance repeatedly failed. The 2017 revised edition adds an epilogue through the ACA.