Sasha Exposes Healthcare.

Let me say something that sounds ridiculous but is completely normal in the United States: your access to healthcare depends on your job. Not your health, not your needs, not your situation. Your job. Lose your job, and you are not just losing income. You are losing your insurance, your medical care, your medications, and…

Patients believe insurance exists to cover the cost of care. That is a reasonable assumption. It is also a wrong one. The real power in American healthcare has nothing to do with who treats you. It has everything to do with who decides whether you get treated at all. Right now, that power belongs to…

Let’s stop pretending this is complicated. If you’ve ever picked up a prescription and felt like you were being mugged at the pharmacy counter, you were. Welcome to American healthcare, where the same exact medication costs three times more than it does in Canada, and the only explanation you’ll get is a shrug and a…

Let’s talk about how Big Pharma keeps making billions off something your cousin’s knockoff bag business also does: slap a new label on the same product and sell it for double. Welcome to the shady world of “me-too” drugs, where pharmaceutical companies slightly tweak a chemical formula just enough to get a brand-new patent, jack…

Let’s be honest. The Affordable Care Act came from a good place. It made it possible for people with preexisting conditions to finally get coverage. It expanded Medicaid. It gave young adults a break by letting them stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26. It opened the door for lower-income folks to access health…

There is a widespread myth in healthcare that only front-desk staff and revenue cycle teams deal with insurance nonsense. The thinking goes: when things get really bad, that’s when the physician steps in, calls the insurance plan directly, and everything magically gets handled. But here’s the truth nobody wants to admit: Even physicians get treated…

Everyone’s favorite villain in healthcare is the insurance company. Greedy premiums, endless denials, a customer service line that feels like purgatory. You get it. You know the villains of that particular story. But let’s take a detour for a minute. Let’s talk about Medicaid. The so-called hero of the working poor, the elderly, and the…

Once upon a time, in 1974, a little company called Charter Med was born in Minnesota. Picture it: medical providers and hospitals trying to organize better care and save money. It looked noble. By 1977, they had renamed themselves UnitedHealthcare Corporation and introduced something called utilization review. On paper, it was a safeguard to make…

You just left your oncologist’s office. You’re terrified. They found something suspicious on your scan, maybe it’s a new mass, maybe your tumor markers are rising. Your doctor wants a PET scan immediately to see if the cancer has spread. You need answers now. But first, your case gets shipped off to some faceless reviewer…

Let me tell you about someone who died because our healthcare system worked exactly as it was designed. He lived in a rural western state and worked hard his entire life. He didn’t have health insurance, not because he didn’t want it, but because he fell into that special trap where you make just enough…