Friends, I’ve got a question for you: how are you doing these days, mental-health-wise? Sometimes on the Medicare for All podcast we can get so busy edutaining about healthcare inequity that we forget to take a pause to check in and make sure we’re all OK. What’s that you say? You too are feeling a little… unwell these days? Us too! It’s an objectively terrible moment in history, we’re entering life under fascism, and all the cool people and things we care about are getting disappeared or DOGEd. When we win Medicare for All, we’re all going to be able to get the mental health support we need, but in the meantime, for this special fan service episode, we’ve gotten us all some help. Our guest today is a licensed counsellor who has agreed to give us all some advice on how to keep fighting the man AND avoid crashing out in 2026!

Tristyn Ariyan is a Licensed Professional Counselor based in San Antonio, TX. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Criminal Justice from the University of Massachusetts, followed by a Master’s in Clinical Mental Health from Bradley University. Tristyn is a National Board Certified Counselor, Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, and an active member of both the American Counseling Association and the Texas Counseling Association. Tristyn founded her private practice, Luna Therapy Solutions, LLC, in early 2022.

She also knows more than you might think about Insane Clown Posse.

Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on your favorite podcast platform! This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund!

If you want to support our work, you can donate here!

At Healthcare NOW, we’re used to getting push-back from folks who don’t believe in Medicare for All, and we always expect to hear from those folks – but this episode is about something different. When we announced our annual national Medicare for All Strategy Conference is happening this November, we got some push-back – not about our fight for healthcare justice, but about our choice of venue. Some of our supporters were upset that we’re going to be gathering in a Red State – ok, arguably the king of the Red States: Florida. We’ve gotten emails from folks who won’t attend on principle because they refuse to go to (and this is a quote) the “Evil DeSantis State.” So today we’re joined by one of the leaders of Medicare for All Florida to dig into what’s happening in Florida, why we’re heading to the Sunshine State for our conference, and – most importantly – how you can join us this November 22&23rd to bring the fight to Red America.

Consider this your official invite to our National Medicare for All Strategy Conference:

Find out more and register here!

Want to learn more about how Medicare for All activists are fighting to move forward toward healthcare justice amid constant assaults on public healthcare from their state government? Check out the Medicare for All Florida website!

Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on your favorite podcast platform! This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund!

If you want to support our work, you can donate here!

Anyone who’s been on the internet and wants to preserve their sanity knows one, eternal truth: Don’t read the comments section. The comments, as we all know, are where our better angels go to die – where we forget our humanity and type out the ugliest, scariest stuff we were apparently thinking all along? Well, today, against our better judgement, we are going to disregard best practice and dig in to what people are saying in the comments about healthcare. Because how are we ever going to win over the people if we don’t know what the people have to say? We tasked our researcher, Ashley Schultz — the most chronically online of our followers, with digging through the dregs of the internet, and she’s here to talk about what she found.

Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform! This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund!

This show is a project of the Healthcare-NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at our website, healthcare-now.org.

:::CONTENT WARNING::: This episode contains graphic discussions of genocide.

Here at the Medicare for All Podcast, we are usually focused on the US, but the fight for universal access to healthcare is one that stretches way beyond our borders. Today we take a global perspective and check in with a group of doctors who are putting their lives on the line to address the serious devastation happening right now in Gaza and its impact on the health of Palestinians living through that devastation. We’re joined by the founders of Doctors Against Genocide to talk about how a political conflict turns into a public health crisis, and what kind of action we can take to stop it.

Our guests are Dr. Karameh Hawash-Kuemmerle, a pediatric neurologist in Boston, Massachusetts, and Dr. Nidal Jboor, an internist in Dearborn, Michigan, who together co-founded of Doctors Against Genocide (DAG), “a global coalition of healthcare workers dedicated to succeeding where global governments have failed in confronting Genocide.”

Want to support the incredible work of Doctors Against Genocide? Whether or not you’re a doctor, you can join DAG and/or donate here!

Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform! This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund!

This show is a project of the Healthcare-NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at our website, healthcare-now.org.

We’re talking about Medicaid folks, the public healthcare system meant to be our social safety net for anyone who can’t afford private insurance and doesn’t have access to healthcare from an employer. I’m sure most of you are aware of Medicaid — but what you might not know is just how many of our friends and neighbors land in that safety net every year. Over 70 Million people in this country rely on the Medicaid program for basic healthcare. That’s 20% of Americans, or one out of every five people you meet. That means that even if you are not on Medicaid, the $880 Billion in cuts to the program proposed by congress will affect you or someone you love, and not in a good way. In fact, just today, researchers at Yale and UPenn released new research stating that the Trump cuts would cause over 51,000 additional Americans to die each year. For this episode, I’m joined by Jaron Benjamin, Deputy Chief of Campaigns from Popular Democracy to break down why we all need to care about stopping the cuts and act NOW, before it’s too late!

We need YOU to join the fight to save Medicaid! Find out more about what you can do here!

You can learn more about the great work happening at Popular Democracy here!

Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform! This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund!

This show is a project of the Healthcare-NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at our website, healthcare-now.org.

Whether you are a party planner or a community organizer, you know that since the pandemic, it has been REALLY hard to get folks out of the house. It makes sense: the news is depressing, our screen-based scrolling culture is alienating, and our politics are polarizing to the point where a casual conversation can easily escalate to throwing hands. That being said, this month has been different! In response to Trump 2.0, we’re seeing an uprising of activism in the streets, with millions of Americans participating in Hands Off protests and other actions to fight back against Trump’s attacks on everything from migrant rights to Medicaid. What’s behind this second wave of Trump resistance? As per usual, it’s a lot of ordinary people deciding they can’t wait any longer for change. On today’s episode, I’m talking to the leaders taking action in my local Texas community to get some perspective on Resistance 2.0 and why it’s all kicking off right now!

In this episode, Gillian talks with her favorite new activists from Indivisible Coastal Bend, the local Indivisible chapter in Corpus Christi, Texas. Ashley, Misty, and Stacie have always been concerned with politics, but the latest developments of the 2nd Trump Administration prompted them to take their concern to the streets and start organizing! Now these women are local leaders in the national uprising happening right now across the US, fighting against cuts to Medicaid and social security, the elimination of DEI, and the overall assault on Democracy. You can read more about the incredible work they’ve been doing here and here!

This is an important moment for all of us in the healthcare justice movement to get together with our allies in the streets to stand up for our public healthcare and demand that we move forward toward universal healthcare, not backward, leaving even more folks out in the cold. So make sure to sign up for our Healthcare Now HEAT (Health Emergency Action Team) to get alerts about rapid response actions you can take to defend Medicaid, Medicare, the VA, reproductive healthcare, gender-affirming care, vaccines, the rights of healthcare workers, and more! Join the team here!

Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform! This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund!

This show is a project of the Healthcare-NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at our website, healthcare-now.org.

For this episode, we’re going back to a familiar villain from podcast-past because unfortunately, healthcare villains have a habit of staying relevant. This is a guy who made his fame by cozying up to Oprah while schilling diet pills, supplements, and medical conspiracy theories – it’s Doctor Oz, who is now Trump’s nominee for Director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That’s right, the man who has previously claimed that there are deadly levels of arsenic in apple juice, that most olive oil is fake, that “Reparative Therapy” can cure homosexuality, and that hydroxychloroquine cures COVID, is pretty close to running our largest public health systems. Today I’m talking with Dr. Diljeet Singh of Physicians for a National Health program about what that means for you and the country at large, and how we can do something about it!

NOTE: At the Medicare for All Podcast, we’ve had a brief, unplanned hiatus due to pesky technical issues – and the fact that Trump is keeping us busy in our organizing work – but we are very excited to be back! I’m flying solo right now while my regular cohost Ben is saving the environment at his 9 to 5 organizing job, but that feels like important work as well, so we’re going to give him a pass and send him our love!

Our guest for this episode was the brilliant Dr. Diljeet Singh! She’s a women’s health advocate, an integrative gynecologic oncologist, and the President of Physicians for a National Health Program. Dr. Singh received her medical degree from Northwestern University and her master’s degree from the Harvard School of Public Health. She completed an obstetrics and gynecology residency at Johns Hopkins and a gynecologic oncology fellowship at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. She completed her doctoral degree in public health on cost analysis at the University of Texas School of Public Health and an associate fellowship in integrative medicine at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Singh and our friends at Physicians for a National Health Program are going all out to let folks know about the serious danger Dr. Oz poses to our national health! Check out the videos from their Dr. Oz Shadow Hearing below:

Even though it is likely that the Senate will make it official later this month, as of April 1st, Dr. Oz still hasn’t been confirmed, so if you’re listening to this in the next couple weeks, you may still be able to call your Senators to ask them to come to their senses! Reach their offices through the Capitol Hill switchboard: (202) 224-3121.

Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform! This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund!

This show is a project of the Healthcare-NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at our website, healthcare-now.org.

Listeners, what were you doing in 2004? Perhaps you were strolling down the street in low rise jeans, Uggs, and a Livestrong bracelet listening to Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” Or maybe you were sitting in a movie theater ready to have your mind blown by Ashton Kutcher’s tour de force performance in The Butterfly Effect. Well, the folks joining us on this week’s episode of our podcast may have missed some of that stuff because they were too busy building a movement for healthcare justice! 2024 marks the 20th anniversary of Healthcare NOW, the national organization fighting for Medicare for All that brings you your favorite podcast! If you’re a regular listener, you probably know that I was the Executive Director of Healthcare NOW for 11 years, and Gillian is the current Executive Director, but today we’re taking it back to 2004 and talking with some of the OGs who started it all!

This episode features some of our very favorite people — the leaders in the healthcare justice movement who have made Healthcare NOW what it is today (the creator of your favorite podcast content!):

• Mark Dudzic is a longtime union organizer and activist. He served as national organizer of the Labor Party from 2003 to 2007 and was a cofounder of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer in 2009. He has been a member of the Healthcare Now board since its founding in 2004.
• Lindy Hern is the Chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and President of the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology. She has been on the Healthcare NOW board since 2009 and is the author of “Single Payer Healthcare Reform: Grassroots Mobilization and the Turn Against Establishment Politics in the Medicare for All Movement.”
• Donna Smith is an advocate for single payer, improved and expanded Medicare for all. Her journalism career included work as a stringer for NEWSWEEK magazine, editing and reporting for the Black Hills Pioneer in South Dakota, as well as appearances on CNN and Bill Moyers Journal, and as one of the subjects in Michael Moore’s 2007 film, SiCKO. She worked for National Nurses United and traveled more than 250,000 miles advocating for health justice. She now serves as the National Advisory Board chair for Progressive Democrats of America.
• Walter Tsou is a Board Advisor to Physicians for a National Health Program and on the Board of HCN. He has been a long time single payer healthcare activist. Walter is a former Health Commissioner of Philadelphia and Past President of the American Public Health Association.
• Cindy Young has been a healthcare activist for over 40 years. She has served on the Health Care Now board since 2012. In her retirement, she serves as a Vice President for the California Alliance for Retired Americans (CARA), whose principle goal is to establish a single payer system in California.

If this episode doesn’t give you your fill of Healthcare NOW history, you can always check out Lindy’s book or this sweet tribute to our founder Marilyn Clement.

And of course, if you want to keep up the good work of all these amazing folks, you can make a donation to support our work!