Photo: Micheal J via Flickr
Over the past year, Sarah Kliff (@sarahkliff) at Vox has been collecting emergency department bills from around the country and has reported a number of stories based on them.
Her stories included a patient who went to an in-network ER and was still billed nearly $8,000 and a major ER that – at the time – didn’t participate in the networks of any private health insurers, resulting in unexpected bills.
Content note: This blog post mentions sexual assault.
I read (and write) nonfiction all day long, so most of my me-time pleasure reading is limited to fiction. I recently made an exception on a friend’s recommendation and listened to the audiobook of Roxane Gay’s “Hunger,” as read by the author (which was important and relevant given its content).
It was not an easy book to listen to, but I’m so glad that I did — both personally and for my work as a journalist. I think it’s a book every health journalist ought to consider reading if they are able. (My reason for saying “if they are able” will become apparent shortly.) Continue reading
Please welcome these new professional and student members to AHCJ.
All new members are welcome to stop by this post’s comment section to introduce themselves. Continue reading
Photo: stevenharman via Flickr
CNN has found itself caught up in a complicated libel case after an investigative story it ran in 2015 about the congenital cardiac surgery program at St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach, Fla. You can read an excellent summary and discussion of the whole mess in a CJR piece written by Trudy Lieberman a month after the original story went live. Continue reading
Photo: stevenharman via Flickr
How many times have you wanted to make a comparison between two numbers — a local rate and national rate, or some kind of rate for one type of surgery vs another, or one demographic group vs another … but you didn’t have the comparison statistics you needed?
What did you do? Did you write around the issue and choose a different angle or framing? Did you cobble together the number you needed from different sources? Did you use a similar number but include qualifications about limitations of the comparison? Continue reading
Photo: Phil GalewitzMore than 80 people attended the AHCJ D.C. chapter holiday party. There were reporters from Kaiser Health News, The Hill, The New York Times, Politico, Stat and many independent journalists.
The eighth annual holiday party for the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Association of Health Care Journalists hosted reporters alongside a record number of public affairs officials from government agencies.
About 20 spokespeople were in attendance, representing the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, the Indian Health Service, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Administration for Community Living, and the Health Resources and Services Administration. Continue reading