The Ranter
Markus Grant investigates the systems extracting from regular people. Healthcare, housing, labor, money in politics.
Each episode: name the system, show the receipts, give the audience a move they can take. Both parties named when both parties cashed the check. Mechanism over motive. No team jerseys.
Each episode runs in segments (Cold Open, Morning, Noon, Evening). Chapter markers let you skip around.
Full episodes drop Saturdays at 8 AM ET. Sidebars between major arcs.
Daily writing: newsletter.theranter.com
Animated version: youtube.com/@TheRanterOfficial
Receipt index: theranter.com
The Ranter
Latest Episodes
Why "Nobody Went Back to Check" Is the Most Important Phrase in Journalism
The story everyone tells: Colonial India had a cobra problem. The British put a bounty on dead cobras. Indians started breeding cobras to collect the bounty. The British canceled the program. The breeders released their now-worthless snakes. An...
Ticketmaster Just Started Showing Real Prices. The Loophole Already Exists.
Last week the FTC forced Ticketmaster to show the full price upfront. They complied. Which, in Ticketmaster, means the mugging now comes with an itemized receipt.The advertised price is just the bait price. Junk fees, drip pricing, reso...
Facility Fees - When Your Doctor's Office Becomes a "Facility"
Same doctor. Same room. Same forty-minute appointment. Bill comes in 50% higher than last time. Why? The hospital bought the doctor's office. Rewrote the paperwork. The same room is now a "facility" and you get billed for being inside it.
EP03: Your Hospital Bill Is Wrong. Here's Why That's by Design.
American hospitals maintain "chargemaster" prices: fictional rates that bear no relationship to actual costs or insurance-negotiated rates. A procedure that costs $400 to deliver gets negotiated at $800 for insured patients and billed at $3,500...
EP02: The Cure Heist - How Drugs Get Priced
In 2015, Martin Shkreli raised the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 overnight. Same molecule. Same factory. Same patient population. The only thing that changed was who owned the company. The healthcare industry called it an outlier. The a...