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Lilah Raptopoulos
We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Transcript news every morning.
This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Surviving US healthcare. Plus: Prince Harry’s “Spare”’
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Lilah Raptopoulos
Around a year ago, our Chicago correspondent, Claire Bushey, found out that she had breast cancer. Claire has always been very healthy, so the diagnosis was pretty shocking to her. The breast cancer had spread to her lymph nodes, which meant she had to have surgery and then eight rounds of chemotherapy and then radiation. It was really bad. There was only one upside to this whole thing — assuming these things even can have an upside — and that was that Claire had really good insurance through the FT. So the treatment was at least manageable financially. She didn’t really have to keep tabs on what her doctors were charging or what her insurance was paying out. She knew she was covered. But then as the weeks of treatment stretched on, she thought to herself, “Actually, I would really like to know how much all of this is costing”.
When did you start to ask yourself that question? Like, what does my life cost?
Claire Bushey
Well (sigh), gosh. At the beginning, at the very beginning, right after diagnosis, I thought I was gonna read books about cancer. (Laughter)
Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Claire Bushey
Yeah I know. (Laughter) But I got a copy of The Undying by the poet Anne Boyer — she was 41 when she too was diagnosed with breast cancer and she ended up writing this sort of meditation that, like, won the Pulitzer Prize. And I had, like, read some reviews of it, and the line had been mentioned “How many books, to pay back the world for my still existing, would I have to write?” And that just, like, stayed with me even though I could not read the rest of her book. I still have not been able to finish her book.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Claire’s a really beautiful writer too, and she recently wrote a piece that tried to answer that question: “How much is my life worth?” She went back through all of her bills and looked at those numbers that she’d been avoiding, like the hospital charges and the insurance payouts. And what she found is that none of it matched up. The hospitals billed at one rate, her insurance company paid something else, and somehow it was all normal practice. Claire was also thinking a lot about how, just ten years ago, she didn’t have insurance at all. What would have happened if she got diagnosed then?
Claire Bushey
This was not a financially devastating event for me, and I am so aware it is because of luck. This had happened to me ten years ago, I’d be wiped out. My family would have been bankrupt, so you know, ‘cause, like, I would have paid everything I had and then they would have paid everything they had. And, like, that just would have been it.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
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Lilah Raptopoulos
Today, I talk to Claire about what her own cancer treatment taught her about the US healthcare system, that no one actually knows the real cost for any procedure. And that fact is driving healthcare prices up for all of us. Then we speak with my colleague, Henry Mance. He’s here to help explain what exactly it is about Prince Harry’s new memoir that keeps us still interested in the royal story. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.
Claire, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Claire Bushey
Thank you very much for having me.
Lilah Raptopoulos
So you recently wrote this extremely moving personal piece about your experience with insurance in the US while you had breast cancer. And just so our listeners aren’t worried about you as we talk, I’m very happy to confirm that you are free of cancer.
Claire Bushey
Yes. Thank you. It was much easier to write the column with experiences, like, behind me. (Laughter)
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Right. So a little over a year ago, you were diagnosed with breast cancer. Can you tell us that story, how you found out?
Claire Bushey
Yeah. So I was due to get a mammogram. You know, I was 41 and I had not gotten one at 40 because we were in the midst of a global pandemic. And a lot of things kind of slid off. And I had a lump and I was worried about it. But I went to a gynaecologist. She was like, “It’s fine, no worries”. So I sort of sailed into that first mammogram . . . like . . . not worried at all. And I, you know, I was told by the tech, I’m like, “oh, like this will probably take a little bit longer than normal because it’s your first one”. I’m like, “oh, thanks for letting me know. Would have been worried otherwise”.
Lilah Raptopoulos
The mammogram did take a long time. And then the doctor asked for a sonogram and then a biopsy, which would have to be done on another day.
Claire Bushey
But I’m still trying to be like really calm, cool and collected. And I was like, “Well, yeah, but like, lots of women get biopsies, don’t they?” And that’s when she said “Yes, and there are a lot of women I would tell not to worry. But you’re not one of them.”
Lilah Raptopoulos
Ohhh . . .
Claire Bushey
And that’s like, like, like I couldn’t hear anything after that.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Claire actually had a few biopsies after that. They showed that the breast cancer was in two spots. So she had a lumpectomy, the surgery to remove those lumps. And then a lymph node biopsy at the same time — that showed that the cancer had spread to her lymphatic system.
Claire Bushey
No one was expecting it to, but it had. And yeah, it was, it was one of those things, like, I walked in to talk to the surgeon and I had, like, all my questions about, like, healing after surgery. And she said, “it’s in the lymph nodes. You’re gonna need to do chemo. You’re gonna lose your hair”. And I was just sort of looking at my questions and I was like, “well, aside from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?”
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Right.
Claire Bushey
So, yeah, so I started chemo about a month after that, and I did eight rounds of a really typical regimen for breast cancer. And then you get a month off to recover. And then I started six weeks of radiation.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, I’m so glad you’re OK.
Claire Bushey
(Laughter) Thank you.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Claire Bushey
I’m sorry, I get, like, upset and emotional when I talk about it. Like it’s . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
I . . . Yeah.
Claire Bushey
It was brutal.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. At what point did you start thinking in terms of, like, will this be something I can afford?
Claire Bushey
I never worried too much about the cost because I was fully insured, because I had a full-time job at the Financial Times. I was very conscious of the fact that ten years earlier, I had been uninsured.
Lilah Raptopoulos
The chemotherapy Claire went through broke down her veins. The radiation made her turn photosensitive so she couldn’t stand to be outside for more than 20 minutes. It was also all really expensive. All in all, her hospital billed her insurance company more than $400,000.
OK, so, Claire, you petitioned your hospital to give you all the billing records, and then you found out that over your entire treatment, your hospital, which is Northwestern in Chicago, billed your insurance company more than $400,000. But the insurance company paid less than half of that. And I think that this is the part that’s gonna be most confusing to people: why are there two numbers? Like, shouldn’t those numbers be the same? Isn’t that how paying for stuff works?
Claire Bushey
Ha ha ha ha. Not, not in the upside down world of the US healthcare system. So there’s a couple different pricing structures and they have nothing to do with each other. You have what the healthcare providers charge — in this case, the hospital. These are called the “chargemaster” prices. No one knows what they have to do with anything.
Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter) Really.
Claire Bushey
They do have to be disclosed now, thanks to federal law.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.
Claire Bushey
Then you have the negotiated prices, what major insurers negotiate with healthcare providers to actually pay.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Claire Bushey
And that money is what actually changes hands in the case of insured people. And so that would be like, the actual price paid. And the thing, though, that, like nobody actually knows, is how much it actually cost Northwestern to treat me for cancer.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Right.
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OK. Let me just repeat that, because it’s kind of the crux of the story. In the US, the amount you pay a doctor to treat you has nothing to do with the amount the treatment costs the hospital. Actually, we just don’t know how much that is. Hospitals don’t have to tell us. Instead, the hospitals charge these, quote unquote, “chargemaster” prices, which are some amount of money pulled basically from thin air, but based on the assumption that they’re going to get bargained down. It’s like you go on vacation and you’re haggling for a rug in a market where you have no idea how much that rug is actually worth. Like, say, it’s a $50 rug, but the guy’s asking you for $5,000.
You know, your biggest procedure was your lumpectomy, which you found cost the insurance company about $30,000. Is that right?
Claire Bushey
Yes. My procedure, everything I had done that day. You know, Cigna, my insurance company, ended up paying about 30,000 to Northwestern.
Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, so what does that include?
Claire Bushey
So Northwestern sends a bill to the insurer Cigna, and it has charges for like, every single thing that happened that day in surgery, all the charges for the facility itself and then also all the charges by the individual doctors. Like, the facility charges included things like, like a pregnancy test, OK, for which they charged $141 . . . excuse me . . . (laughter) for which they billed $141.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Claire Bushey
Walgreens was around the corner, like . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Where you could buy a pregnancy test for about ten bucks.
Claire Bushey
Yes!
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Claire Bushey
But Cigna does not pay that. They have negotiated a contract with Northwestern to pay a much smaller amount.
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Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m just gonna repeat that. Her hospital charged her insurance company more than $140 for a pregnancy test, which is more than ten times what a pregnancy test actually costs. And that’s how it works for everything — getting your blood drawn, surgery, drugs that you have to take over time for chronic health problems. The fact that there’s no transparency means we’re feeding a system that’s just getting more and more bloated. Because when an insurance company haggles down a pregnancy test from $140 to $25, that sounds like a good deal. It’s a big difference, but it’s still double what a pregnancy test should cost. That’s a bad deal. And if that’s happening across the board? Not great.
Claire Bushey
And one of the most interesting things in doing the reporting for this column is that I talked with an organisation called Healthcare Bluebook that studies these negotiated prices between insurance companies and healthcare providers.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.
Claire Bushey
In a representative US sample of 50 claims paid out by private insurers around the US, a lumpectomy could cost anywhere between $5,400 and nearly $40,000.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow.
Claire Bushey
Right. And so if you can do this for $5,400, you have to wonder then: what is all the extra money for?
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah.
The other question is: who takes on that extra cost? And the answer to that is anyone who’s paying for healthcare, people who don’t have insurance, people who do have insurance, and also our employers who are often paying for a lot of our monthly insurance fees. Claire says they’re taking on a big chunk of that cost.
Claire Bushey
As the expert I spoke with said, every time I pay 30,000 for something that’s worth 10,000, that’s 20,000 I don’t have to hire another employee, to pay people higher salaries or to use in other investments. Because, you know, it’s not gonna, it’s not going to disappear, like, Cigna is going to raise premiums.
Lilah Raptopoulos
One last thing. Not all insurance companies are good at negotiating. The smaller ones, which are often cheaper, have less bargaining power. So when they’re haggling with the hospital, the hospital might not accept their lower bid. And if they don’t, you personally could be stuck with the bill. You could go in for treatment and come out to find that you owe the difference, which means that tens of millions of people every year file for bankruptcy over hospital bills in America — even if they have insurance.
What about for people who don’t have health insurance? You know, like, within, you know, if you look at the $141 for the pregnancy test — at the drugstore that costs ten bucks — are people who don’t have insurance paying the $141 . . .
Claire Bushey
Yes.
Lilah Raptopoulos
. . . for a pregnancy test?
Claire Bushey
Yes.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Claire Bushey
Yes. That to me is the most infuriating part. But I spoke with an expert on healthcare pricing at Johns Hopkins University, and she said, you know, those prices that are charged by the healthcare providers, the chargemaster prices . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.
Claire Bushey
. . . that supposedly have nothing to do with anything and that hospitals like to pretend that nobody pays, that’s not true. They are . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Claire Bushey
. . . paid by somebody. And they are paid most often by the uninsured.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. You know, this question feels futile, but what can be done? We’re all stuck in this sort of, like, weird tug of war. This, like, terrible game. I think you said that medical issues are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the US.
Claire Bushey
Yes.
Lilah Raptopoulos
And is there anything anyone can do about it? You know, our employers, the hospitals, the government, like, how do you break it?
Claire Bushey
I think it would be better if we had a system where the government paid for healthcare. I think that would be an improvement and I think it would be fairer.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Claire Bushey
I also think that employers should do everything they can to find out what healthcare services actually cost. So that’s, that’s a check on the system. And finally, I would encourage everyone to be a pain in the ass and to get their detailed medical bills because . . . It doesn’t change anything, but it gums up the system a little bit and I, being the vengeful, spiteful person that I am, took a certain amount of satisfaction in that.
Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter) Claire, thank you so much for your openness, for your clarity of thought. And we’re all very glad you’re healthy. Thanks for being on the show.
Claire Bushey
Thank you for having me. And yeah, I’m glad that I’m healthy, too.
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Lilah Raptopoulos
I have put links to Claire’s wonderful piece in the show notes. She also recommends that anyone who doesn’t have health insurance reads a book called Never Pay the First Bill. I’ve put that in there, too.
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Recently, I surprised myself by pitching a segment to my team based off of something I don’t even really know why I’m still interested in. It’s a topic that’s been excessively covered, borderline too much, but we all still keep wanting more.
Henry Mance
This is what the royal family is these days, right? It’s entertainment . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Henry Mance
It’s the glue. It’s the, you know, a global franchise that people, you know, know enough about that developments are interesting, right? You know, my colleagues or my neighbours or my friends, you know, they probably haven’t seen the same TV series as me or that have a different point in there . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Mmm.
Henry Mance
But, you know, and knows enough to have an opinion.
Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s Henry Mance, the FT’s chief features writer. We’re talking, of course, about the British royal family, specifically the two who stepped down from their duties, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle. Henry just reviewed Prince Harry’s new memoir. It’s called Spare and Spare is the latest drop in a landslide of recent content from these two that’s meant to tell their side of the story. I invited Henry on to help me understand why this is still such a point of fascination culturally.
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Harry and Meghan did an interview with Oprah last year. Meghan launched this Spotify podcast a few months ago. There is six, a six-hour Netflix kind of mini-series about their life. I have come prepared. I have consumed basically all of this content.
Henry Mance
Oh, wow! Good for you. (Laughter)
Lilah Raptopoulos
I even read way more of the book than I meant to, I was totally hooked. Harry’s memoir came out last week. People have been anticipating it. Can you explain, like the CliffsNotes version of why this is a big deal?
Henry Mance
I think this is a really, a revelatory royal book. And a lot of people have such mixed feelings about someone in the royal family coming forward and being so open. That, I think we sometimes avoid just saying openly that this is incredible. You know, people who have watched The Crown, people who have read newspaper stories, people . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Henry Mance
. . . who have seen interviews with people who call themselves royal commentators or royal experts. Like all of that pales in comparison to the amount of detail and insight that we get from these 400 pages.
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Lilah Raptopoulos
Here are a few things you’ll learn from Spare. Harry and his brother William have not been close for decades. Harry was barely hugged as a child after his mother, Diana, died. And often he was really desperate for it. Harry lost his virginity behind a pub in a field. Harry’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, made a mean salad dressing. His father, Prince Charles, loves to smell things and wears too much cologne. Harry hates wearing kilts because of the breeze that goes up your arse. And despite apparent rumours, he is indeed circumcised. It’s a lot. It’s just a lot. It feels almost like the book exists partially to refute every rumour that has ever come out about him and set the record straight.
Henry Mance
I think there are revelations in there which could have stayed private. I felt particularly uncomfortable when he was describing not just his feelings about Diana, for example, but describing his brother’s feelings .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Henry Mance
. . . about Diana. And I sort of thought, well, that’s not really your story to share . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.
Henry Mance
Even if you’ve now have a very bad relationship and feel betrayed by your brother.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Big question: but where do you think our insatiable interest in this family comes from? And I’m curious specifically about the difference between, like, the British perception and the British interest in this, and the American perception.
Henry Mance
I’m the, I guess I’m the type of British person who isn’t much interested in the royal family on a . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Henry Mance
. . . day-to-day basis. I want, you know, I wanna make clear that I do not go around wondering what Kate is wearing or (laughter) you know, who Charles is giving a medal to today. And they are really in the background of my life. And newspapers like the Financial Times do not cover the monarchy very much.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Henry Mance
And this has been a sort of exceptional couple of years. And I think really the arrival of Meghan Markle transformed the royal story into a, into a real story about social change, about diversity, about modernity. And it came, obviously, we have #MeToo and, you know, Black Lives Matter, which both seem to raise the issues of feminism and race that she was, she was interested in and became a global story because she was American.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.
Henry Mance
So I think that’s yeah, we really are in a sort of boom time for royalty. It’s not always like this.
Lilah Raptopoulos
I’d like to understand what being pro- and anti-Meghan and Harry means in Britain, because it feels like here we feel that they’re underdogs who are fighting the system. So they’re sympathetic characters and the system itself is kind of ridiculous. It’s got crowns and pomp and also it’s, you know, represents colonialism. But in Britain, the system is, in actual fact. I guess the question is, what is the kind of consensus on Harry and Meghan and what does it mean to be for them or against them?
Henry Mance
The funny thing is that Harry was once the, you know, the more popular son of Charles and Diana, and he was particularly popular amongst the tabloid press . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.
Henry Mance
. . . who saw him as kind of, as one of them, as like a cheeky chap, a naughty boy.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.
Henry Mance
And he makes clear in the book that he didn’t, he was never actually that happy with that label. But, you know, he was the guy flushing people’s heads down the toilet at school.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. (Laughter)
Henry Mance
You know, this is all sort of a bit more interesting than the very s-
Lilah Raptopoulos
Smoking a little pot once in a while. Yeah.
Henry Mance
Yeah. And you know, that really changed after his marriage to Meghan. And I think if you look at his, the percentage of the population who has a positive opinion of him, it’s gone from sort of 80 per cent in 2018 down to 26 per cent . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow.
Henry Mance
. . . now. So, you know, really a huge fall. And, you know, he went to Canada and then California just at the start of . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Covid.
Henry Mance
Covid. And we’ve got a cost of living crisis. So it’s not the ideal time, I think, to be telling a hard luck story when you’ve got a, you know, a chicken, a chicken house, which is the size of many bed sets in London. At the same time, there are obviously people and particularly people of colour in Britain who felt represented when Meghan married into the royal family, who thought that the royal family would never change, would never be biracial, multiracial. And it became that. It gave them a feeling of ownership of this institution.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.
Henry Mance
You know, the people I talk to, it’s no longer a case of being really pro-Harry. It’s a case of saying, “I’ll kind of leave him alone” or, you know, you know . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.
Henry Mance
“Everyone makes mistakes”.
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Lilah Raptopoulos
Here’s what I thought after reading Harry’s book. The form is what makes it so important. A first-person narrative is the opposite of what we ever get with the royal family. Usually we get ritual, distance, mythology, the family as an institution. I mean, they’re technically not even really supposed to be mere humans. If you’re Anglican, the royal family is channelling the will of God. But this book is Prince Harry saying, “Actually, hi, I am a human. And here is everything that’s ever happened to me”. So as you start reading, you’re thinking, “Oh my God, this is amazing. This is scratching every itch I’ve ever wanted”. But then suddenly, it hits some points where you start to think, “actually, maybe I wouldn’t mind a little bit of a filter”, just some sort of proof that this man has thought carefully about what to let out and what to keep in. You start to sort of worry about him.
Henry Mance
I agree.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Henry Mance
The criticism I disagree with is this: people say, how can this couple who, you know, want their privacy and say that they couldn’t handle royal life because of this constant invasion of privacy — how can they then go and tell everything in a documentary, in interviews and now . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Henry Mance
. . . in this book? And I reject that criticism. And I think it’s very important to distinguish between the type of coverage and the types of invasions of privacy where you don’t have control, where you have no consent, and those kind of tell-alls where you have given consent. And I, you know, I liken it, in my review I say, you know, Warren Buffett has promised to give all his money away, but that doesn’t mean you can go and take his car.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Henry Mance
You know, consent is important.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Henry Mance
So I think they do have the right to tell their story if they want to.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Henry Mance
And I think Harry has got this particular problem, which is that he is the spare. He’s not the oldest sibling, so he’s not in line for the throne. And he, I think, struggles to accept this role and he struggles to accept it, particularly when he marries Meghan, who is a, who is a star, who’s wonderfully photogenic. They get loads of good publicity and I . . . It comes across that he wants to have sort of level status with William and Kate.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Henry Mance
Because he sees Meghan as sort of unrivalled at the job, the job of getting publicity, of pursuing causes. And that’s just not how the monarchy works. It’s hierarchical, it’s based on age. And he . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Henry Mance
He just can’t accept that. So it’s all the family tensions, all the family rivalries and jealousies . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Henry Mance
. . . layered upon top, layered on top with the, the sort of this, the constraints of the monarchy. I mean it really, he describes it as “fancy captivity”. And it does sound pretty awful at times.
Lilah Raptopoulos
You say, your last, the last line of your review is really great. You say the book Spare asks the question: what happens to those royals for whom there is no role and who would probably not be right for the role even if it came to them? There is no good answer. And it leaves me wondering, which is kind of my last question: what do you think the role is for these two? You know, this is maybe a crude way to put it, but they’ve sold their grievances. They may have reached the limit of how much content they can put out on that topic. What do you think they’d do next?
Henry Mance
I think they wanna use their personal stories as a springboard into, you know, talking about other people’s stories. So they want to . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Henry Mance
Yeah, whatever they put out next, they want it to be less about how they feel and more about “Alright. You know, I trust Harry as a, as a presenter or as a voice or as a kind of Oprah figure. And so . . . ”
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Henry Mance
“I’m gonna let him investigate mental health.”
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Henry Mance
I’m not sure that suits him in particular. So I think they’ve now got to, now comes the hard bit where not everything they say is interesting. You know, everything he says about royal life has been interesting and revelatory. Whereas I think this transition now, I think this is the, this is the hard part. And I . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Henry Mance
You know, whether there’s a reconciliation, I think one day there probably will be, but it doesn’t seem to be imminent.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. I think maybe they should just take a little bit of a break. (Laughter)
Henry Mance
If you’re listening . . . Yeah, I think they would be well advised to, to stay out of the limelight.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Henry. We did it. I really think . . . (laughter) I feel, I feel so relieved . . .
Henry Mance
We did it. I managed to. Yeah.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Thank you so much for being here. This is fun.
Henry Mance
Hey, thanks a lot. It’s a real pleasure.
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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times. Before you go, I have a favour to ask you. We are running a survey that takes about 10 minutes, to get a sense of what you think of the show. We want to know what you like, what you want to hear more of, anything that basically makes the show better for you. If you fill it out, it puts you in the running to win a pair of Bose QuietComfort earbuds. And it would really mean a lot to us. So you can find the survey at FT.com/weekendsurvey. That link is in the show notes, alongside everything else mentioned today.
Next week we are speaking with the novelist Gabrielle Zevin. She wrote the incredible and extremely popular novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. We’ll also talk to a colleague who tried to buy a Rolex and fell into a deep, complex grey market.
If you want to say hi, put it in the survey. I’m just kidding. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@FT.com. The show is on Twitter @ftweekendpod and I am on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap. I post a lot about the show on my Instagram.
I am Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and special thanks this week go to Manuela Saragosa and Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.
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