What is it like for people living in poverty to take the afternoon off to go see a doctor?

Not only do they forgo badly needed wages, but often they must also find someone to watch their children and then scramble to catch a ride or come up with bus fare – only to spend five minutes with the doctor and leave with a prescription that doesn’t address their most pressing concerns.

The Commonwealth Fund’s Shanoor Seervai and Corinne Lewis listened to stories like this from more than 100 low-income patients and the primary care providers who serve them.

On this episode of The Dose, they discuss what they learned about the time constraints and financial barriers that can make it an ordeal for people living in poverty to seek even the most routine health care.

If you have a heart attack, chances are you won’t feel up to asking the emergency room doctor, “Are you in my network?”

What’s more, if you’re lucky enough to recover, there’s the chance that you’ll be stuck with a bill for health services that you thought your insurance would cover.

On this episode of The Dose, host Shanoor Seervai talks to Kevin Lucia and Jack Hoadley of Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute about the ubiquitous problem of surprise medical bills. Why do so many people get bills they don’t expect? And what are our leaders doing about it?

When a homeless person gets discharged from hospital, he needs a safe place to recover. When a poor patient faces a high co-pay for a medicine she needs, she is often too embarrassed to tell her doctor – instead, she may not fill the prescription.

Doctors don’t typically try to solve these social problems, but some want to do better at understanding patients’ lived experiences. In the latest episode of The Dose, Ishani Ganguli and Janine Knudsen, both primary care providers at innovative clinics, talk to Shanoor Seervai about how they are trying to treat a patient as a whole person, rather than focusing on a single medical condition. They discuss the successes and challenges of caring for patients in their daily practice in light of the findings of a recent survey of people living with serious illness in the United States.

If you have a cold or cough, an antibiotic may not be the cure. If you have a minor injury from playing hockey, a CT scan of the head may not be necessary. Then why do so many doctors prescribe these, and what can be done to stop it?

On this episode of The Dose, Shanoor interviews Wendy Levinson, M.D. and Karen Born, who run the Choosing Wisely Canada campaign. Based on the philosophy, ‘more is not always better,’ Choosing Wisely is a campaign to help clinicians and patients engage in a dialogue to avoid unnecessary medical tests, treatments, and procedures.

What happens when a bus company teams up with a senior center offering health promotion classes? Older people who want to attend are able arrive on time.

On this episode of The Dose, host Shanoor Seervai talks to Amanda Brewster, a health policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, about how health care organizations can work with groups providing social services to get older people the care they need.

While most conversations about health care focus on medical issues, Brewster’s work is part of a growing body of research showing that social factors – like food, housing, and transport – can have a big impact on our health.

The U.S. health care system frequently overlooks the needs of Americans with disabilities. Medical offices are often inaccessible to people in wheelchairs, for example, and mammography machines often aren’t equipped with simple modifications that could enable more women to get screened.

Such inaccessibility may be contributing to health problems for people with disabilities: they receive less preventive care than people without disabilities, have higher rates of chronic conditions, and are far more likely to be admitted to the hospital.

On this week’s episode of The Dose, host Shanoor Seervai talks to Martha Hostetter and Sarah Klein, who recently studied several health plans and clinics that have created custom models, helping people with disabilities live with dignity and independence.

In the midst of the “Me Too” movement and a national reckoning on how women are treated, the Commonwealth Fund published a report on the status of women’s health and health care in the U.S. and 10 other wealthy nations.

The study revealed that women in the U.S. are three times more likely to die in childbirth than those in Sweden and Norway and are more emotionally distressed than women in Germany or France. It also found that nearly half of U.S. women report problems with their medical bills, compared with only 2 percent of women in the U.K.

On this episode of The Dose, the Commonwealth Fund’s Munira Gunja, Roosa Tikkanen, and Shanoor Seervai dig into these findings and discuss how the current political climate may worsen health care for U.S. women.

How many people bought health insurance for 2019 on the individual market? What is going to happen in the first year after the penalty for not having insurance is repealed? Why did a federal judge in Texas say that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is unconstitutional?

On this year-end episode of The Dose, host Shanoor Seervai talks to David Blumenthal, M.D. about the big health care events of 2018, and what they mean for next year. They discuss how executive action may impact the working of the Affordable Care Act, decisive action that some states are taking on Medicaid, and how large corporations made deeper inroads into health care.

On today’s show, Shanoor talks to Don Moulds about what freedom means when it comes to health care. They look at the individual mandate, the controversial provision of Obamacare that requires people to have health insurance. Don argues that getting rid of the mandate restricts freedom in America, because having health insurance frees us from the fear that if we fall ill, we may not have access to care.