1. Provide the title of your story or series and the names of the journalists involved.
"How Insurers Reject You"
"Unreconciled"
"Why Stupak is Wrong"
"Author, Author"
All by Timothy Noah.
2. List date(s) this work was published or aired.
April 19, 2010.
3. Provide a brief synopsis of the story or stories, including any significant findings.
1) "How Insurers Reject You" used a confidential document from BlueCross BlueShield of Texas (exclusively obtained by Slate) to examine the ludicrous extent to which insurers in the non-group market count even the most trivial preexisting conditions against people applying for health insurance, a practice now being phased out under the new Health Policy law.
2) "Unreconciled" explains how the reconciliation process, which Health Policy opponents claimed was never used for substantive legislation, had actually been used to pass the most substantive domestic bill of the Clinton administration (and one dear to those same opponents' hearts) welfare reform. This column was much-cited after it appeared.
3) "Why Stupak Is Wrong," which was cited even more widely, explained why Rep. Bart Stupak's claim that the Senate-passed Health Policy law would let taxpayer funds pay for abortions was not a matter of ideological disagreement, but simply incorrect, and tried to explain Stupak's flawed logic more fully than Stupak had been able to do for himself.
4) "Author, Author" eviscerated the Heritage Foundation's self-serving denial that Obamacare was substantially influenced by policies earlier developed at … Heritage.
4. Explain types of documents, data or Internet resources used. Were FOI or public records act requests required? How did this affect the work?
I used publicly-available documents in nearly all instances, many available on the Web. The exception was the Blue Cross Blue Shield manual, a confidential document to which I obtained exclusive access.
5. Explain types of human sources used.
Mostly congressional aides, members of Congress, academics and other health experts.
6. Results (if any).
The latter three columns, all of them laying out evidence that contradicted arguments made against Health Policy, were quickly and widely distributed via the Web and helped put these questionable arguments to rest. I should hasten to add that in my coverage I also laid out evidence contradicting claims made by Health Policy supporters, most significantly, on behalf of the Cadillac tax; I didn't submit the relevant columns because they appeared in 2009. These Cadillac-tax columns, alas, did not exercise as much influence, probably because they didn't fit as neatly into the contours of the existing debate.
7. Follow-up (if any). Have you run a correction or clarification on the report or has anyone come forward to challenge its accuracy? If so, please explain.
Three corrections, all trivial. (Slate is very scrupulous in its corrections policy, more so than most newspapers.)
1.) I made an absent-minded, erroneous reference, later corrected, to "Rep. Ron Wyden" (he was a representative years ago, but of course he's now a senator) in "Author, Author."
2.) My erroneous sentence in "How Insurers Reject You" stating that TMJ is the same thing as lockjaw was corrected. (The terms are often used interchangeably but technically they are not the same.)
3.) In "Unreconciled" I made an absent-minded erroneous reference to Sen. Mitch McConnell as "majority leader" (he's the minority leader, of course). This was also corrected.
8. Advice to other journalists planning a similar story or project.
With complex and important stories like Health Policy, it's easy to get caught up in reporting minor political developments at the expense of giving readers the fuller explanation of policy disputes they really need. Never forget that you aren't writing for your sources. You're writing for readers who want to know how this bill will affect their lives. Policy details are often judged unsexy and boring by editors, but when done well explanation of what's in a piece of legislation and why it matters is infinitely more interesting than the usually-tedious "who's up and who's down" horse-race coverage editors that editors too often demand. Good explanatory journalism is also well worth doing because amid the heat of political debate misrepresentations about these "tedious" details, both deliberate and inadvertent, are all too common.