Two years ago, Dr. Traci Hurley lost her husband, Dr. Dan Hurley, to cancer. Dan spent the last few years of his life battling his disease - and his insurance company. Before he died, he set himself a goal to, in his own words, help “with the problem of insurance company physicians without expertise denying or delaying care as recommended by the patient’s chosen physician.” Dr. Traci Hurley joins us to share their story.

Those in healthcare - or elsewhere - facing private equity’s relentless encroachment will want to listen up. Journalist Megan Greenwell, author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, joins us to share her reporting on four regular Americans - working in four different fields - who fought against private equity.

The Fall of Crozer Health is a story steeped in grief, greed, and the needs for dignity and for protection. In the final installment of our special series, we unpack the rollercoaster of emotions caused by the health systems' failures, and speak to the lawmakers in Delaware County trying to build the legislative foundation needed to keep this from happening again.

Crozer was not an island, and what happened to them affects all the nearby health systems. In the fourth installment of this special series, we break down how one community’s loss becomes a neighboring community’s nightmare, lay out the ‘private equity playbook’, and explore how the financialization of medicine is everywhere - in every state - and how it affects us all.

When health systems are underwater, you might want to look up upstream to see what the trouble is. When you get there, sometimes you’ll find out why those systems are falling into the water. . . and sometimes you’ll find out who’s pushing them. In this episode, we’re going upstream to look at how we got to the point where a health system that served more than a hundred thousand people per year suddenly closed its doors, and what went wrong along the way.

Correction to an earlier version of the podcast: Michelle Henry was the PA Attorney General at the time she made her remarks featured in this episode, not at the time of the sale, as previously suggested. A correction has been made.

The story of private equity in healthcare is often told in numbers, spreadsheets and transcripts from bankruptcy court. But in Part 2 of our series, we hear from the people in the trenches and on the front lines of Crozer Health, a collapsed hospital system in Pennsylvania, who are living out the awful consequences of decisions made, not by clinicians in Delaware County, but by executives in California and a judge in Texas.

The Crozer Chester Medical Center in PA is closing as we speak, but the fall of Delaware County's largest hospital system has been building for years. In interviews with the doctors, nurses, paramedics, and legislators who kept Delaware County healthy, Wendy and Matt go behind the headlines and speak to the people who are living through these changes right now.

This is the first episode in a multi-part series focusing specifically on Crozer Health.

New episodes drop each week.

We're never more aware of the need for real human interaction than when faced with an automated Patient Portal. In this special bonus ep., Wendy and Matt share a listener voice memo about the challenges of navigating patient care through AI, and talk about how we can - and must - do better.