Emily Pisacreta
Senior Producer, An Arm and a Leg
About
Emily is a journalist, writer, and audio producer based in New York City. In addition to her work at An Arm and a Leg, she produces podcasts for the PBS documentary series FRONTLINE. She is a graduate of the State University of New York at Geneseo and Columbia Journalism School, where she focused on health care reporting and radio and podcast production.
Podcasts
Stories
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How to avoid the crappiest health insurance.
One journalist almost got roped into a scam. Plus, top health insurance nerds teach us how to find and read the fine print.
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The Insurance Warrior takes on a $61B Company
When Mattew Lientz needed surgery to save his life, his insurance wouldn’t cover it. Enter: Laurie Todd, the Insurance Warrior. Her first task: Figuring out who Matthew was really fighting, and how big the battle really was.
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Meet the Insurance Warrior
In 2005, Laurie Todd needed surgery to save her life. Her insurance company had no intention of paying for it. She went to war. Won. And has been helping other do the same ever since.
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Wait, that was legal until now?!?
Hospitals in Maryland were suing patients over bills that should’ve been forgiven. It wasn’t illegal. Until now. How a coalition changed that. This year. Plus, our friends at Dollar For build their bill-crushing army, one Zoom training at a time.
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A legendary lawyer sued hospitals for price-gouging their patients. And got his butt handed to him.
The lawyer was Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, the lawyer who beat Big Tobacco in the 1990s. Later, he launched a series of ill-fated national lawsuits aimed at getting non-profit hospitals to quit price-gouging low-income patients, and chasing them hard for...
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We’re back! Starting Aug 19. And we’ve got some doozies for you.
We’ve been on a hiatus for a minute, and we are SO excited about what we’re coming back with.These are stories we’ve been collecting for months—some of them for more than a year—and they’re big.
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A whole book about fighting effed-up medical bills? Yes, please.
For years, at ProPublica, Marshall Allen has been exposing health care grifters. (He’s our kind of guy.)Now, he's written a book… about how to fight back. It’s called “Never Pay the First Bill.” We talked. It was a whole vibe.
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Revisiting insulin, as relevant (and expensive) as ever
Updating a story we first reported in 2019, about how insulin got to be so horribly expensive—the scientists who discovered it did NOT want price or profits to keep it away from people who need it—and what some people are doing about it.
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A 21st-century Christmas Carol: How one Scrooge became a health-care whistleblower
Former health-care executive Wendell Potter spent part of 2020 publishing high-profile apologies for the lies he says he told the American people in his old job—and trying to debunk the myths he once sold. His story is a modern Christmas Carol.
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Fight! My family tries to pick health insurance for next year. COVID makes it harder.
Keeping the plan we've got means paying $200 a month more. But... would a "cheaper" plan cost us more in the long run? It depends! And COVID makes it a lot more complicated. This stinks.You can hear my wife and me try to puzzle the who...
