This site is intended to help you untangle the wide range of concepts included in the implementation of health care reform. It is put together by journalists for journalists. We hope to provide resources and tips and commentaries and questions that will help deepen your understanding of the federal legislation, provide context for the decisions your state is making about implementation, and explore how reform, as well as parallel changes in the private sector, are affecting doctors, nurses, hospitals and other health care providers, as well as patients and families. 

We thank the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for the support that made this Web portal possible. The foundation has not dictated the content on these pages, but rather has provided a grant or financial sponsorship that allows us to pay for the costs associated with collecting, writing, editing and presenting valuable resources.

Send us ideas, questions, suggestions. Share your successes. Point us to good stories. Help us help you avoid the pitfalls of the not so good ones. We wish you success as you pursue one of health journalism’s core topics.

About your topic leader

Joanne Kenen is AHCJ’s health reform topic leader. She is leading an effort to provide resources to help AHCJ members cover the complexities of implementing health care reform by writing blog posts, tip sheets, articles and other resources.

Kenen is a Washington-based writer who specializes in health and health policy. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, The Washington Post, Slate, the Washingtonian, Kaiser Health News, Health Affairs, Miller-McCune, the American Prospect, AARP Magazine and numerous other publications. She was the senior writer for the Health Policy Program at the New America Foundation, and a Kaiser Media Fellow in 2006-07, where she wrote extensively about palliative medicine, hospice and aging.

A longtime Reuters correspondent in New York, Florida/the Caribbean and Washington, she has covered everything from voodoo festivals to U.S. presidential campaigns and she spent more than a decade covering health policy on Capitol Hill. Thanks to her particularly wakeful second son, she is co-author of a parenting book, "The Sleeplady's Good Night, Sleep Tight." Earlier in her career, she did a lot of reporting from Latin America and co-authored a book on Costa Rica.