The United States has a patchwork system of health insurance coverage that leaves some people with great access to services and some with no coverage at all. It depends on a person’s birthplace, age, job, income, location, and health status.
To help journalists make sense of the confusion, Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms — with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — has created primers for how insurance works in each state plus a national overview that offers the big picture. You can find the guides and overview now on AHCJ’s website.
In this webinar, AHCJ Health Beat Leader Joe Burns, who focuses on health policy and insurance, talks with Charles Ornstein of ProPublica and Sabrina Corlette, J.D., who led the Georgetown project, about the new tool and how to make the most of it in your reporting.
Resources
- Deceptive marketing practices flourish in Medicare Advantage: A report by the Majority Staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance.
- ProPublica’s Claim File Helper: This free tool lets you customize a letter requesting the notes and documents your insurer used when deciding to deny your coverage.
- Glossary of Health Coverage and Medical Terms: A glossary of commonly used terms provided by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
- California Department of Managed Health Care
- Independent Medical Review and Complaint Reports: A searchable database of independent medical review and arbitration decisions, as well as reports on complaints made against health plans.
- Independent Medical Review Search: A searchable database that shows all independent medical review decisions since the program begin in 2001.
- Enforcement Actions Search: A searchable database of enforcement actions taken against insurance and health care providers.
Joseph Burns is AHCJ’s health beat leader on health policy and insurance. He’s an independent journalist based in Brewster, Mass., who has covered health care, health policy and the business of care since 1991. Burns has written for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, Fortune, Hospitals & Health Networks, and Medical Economics, among others.
Sabrina Corlette, J.D., is a research professor, founder, and co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. There, she directs research on health reform issues, with a focus on state and federal regulation of private health insurance. She provides expertise and strategic advice to individuals and organizations on health insurance laws and programs and provides technical support through the publication of resource guides, white papers, issue briefs, blog posts and fact sheets. She has testified numerous times before the U.S. Congress and is frequently quoted in the news media on emerging health care issues. She has published dozens of papers relating to the regulation of private health insurance and health insurance marketplaces.
Charles Ornstein is managing editor for local initiatives at ProPublica, overseeing the nonprofit news organization’s regional offices and its Local Reporting Network. From 2008 to 2017, he was a senior reporter covering health care and the pharmaceutical industry at ProPublica, and then worked as a senior editor and deputy managing editor. Prior to joining ProPublica, he was a member of the metro investigative projects team at the Los Angeles Times and a reporter at the Dallas Morning News. Ornstein is a past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists and an adjunct journalism professor at Columbia University. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
