Annie Waldman
Annie Waldman is a reporter at ProPublica covering health care.
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Annie Waldman is a reporter at ProPublica covering health care. A piece she published with The New York Times on a New Jersey student debt agency prompted a new law and several new bills, aimed at increasing consumer protections for student borrowers and their families. Following her reporting on the largest accreditor of for-profit colleges, the U.S. Department of Education stripped the agency of its powers. Her reporting with Erica Green of The New York Times led to a federal civil rights investigation of discrimination against Native American students on a reservation in Montana.
In 2018, she contributed to the “Lost Mothers” series, which investigated the high rate of maternal mortality in the United States. This series won the 2018 Goldsmith Prize for investigative reporting, received a George Polk Award, a Peabody and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for explanatory reporting. Following her reporting on maternal mortality in New York, the city launched a $12.8 million initiative to reduce maternal deaths and complications among women of color.
She graduated with honors from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, where she was the recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship and the Brown Institute Computational Journalism Award. Her stories have been published in The New York Times, the Atlantic, Vice, BBC News, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Consumer Reports.
She has been a finalist twice and won two awards from the Education Writers Association for her education reporting. She has won an award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and was a finalist for the Loeb Awards for her reporting with Paul Kiel and Al Shaw on the racial disparity of wage garnishment.
Prior to joining ProPublica, she was a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Israel, where she reported on the plight of refugees from Darfur and Eritrea. She was also a recipient of a residency at Cité International des Arts in Paris, France. She had a documentary film in the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, on the lives of homeless high school students after Hurricane Katrina, which was later broadcast nationally on PBS. She produced "Phantom Cowboys," a documentary about male adolescence in small industry towns, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2018.
Her PGP Key ID is E8F41874.
ICE Enforcement Official Tapped to Lead Unaccompanied Migrant Children Office, Triggering Alarms
ICE official Mellissa Harper has been tapped to lead the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Her hire has concerned experts and advocates that information about children and their families could be shared for arrests and deportations.
Insurers Failed to Comply With Mental Health Coverage Law, Department of Labor Report Finds
The probe found widespread noncompliance and violations of federal law in how health plans and insurers cover mental health care, echoing the findings of a recent ProPublica investigation.
UnitedHealth Is Strategically Limiting Access to Critical Treatment for Kids With Autism
Leaked internal documents show that the insurance giant is culling providers of applied behavior analysis from its network and scrutinizing the medical necessity of therapy. Advocates say the company’s strategy may be illegal.
How UnitedHealth’s Playbook for Limiting Mental Health Coverage Puts Countless Americans’ Treatment at Risk
United used an algorithm system to identify patients who it determined were getting too much therapy and then limited coverage. It was deemed illegal in three states, but similar practices persist due to a patchwork of regulation.
New Biden Administration Rules Aim to Hold Insurers Accountable for Mental Health Care Coverage
The regulations will force health insurance plans to collect and report more data on how they limit and deny mental health claims. ProPublica’s reporting has found that insurers regularly shortchange patients seeking treatment.
What Mental Health Care Protections Exist in Your State?
Insurers have wide latitude on when and how they can deny mental health care. We looked at the laws in all 50 states and found that some are charting new paths to secure mental health care access.
Why It’s So Hard to Find a Therapist Who Takes Insurance
Those who need therapy often have to pay out of pocket or go without care, even if they have health insurance. Hundreds of mental health providers told us they fled networks because insurers made their jobs impossible and their lives miserable.
We’re Investigating Mental Health Care Access. Share Your Insights.
ProPublica’s reporters want to talk to mental health providers, health insurance insiders and patients as we examine the U.S. mental health care system. If that’s you, reach out.
This Researcher Warned of Unnecessary, Risky Vascular Procedures. She Was Called a “Nazi” and Accused of “Fratricide.”
After Dr. Caitlin Hicks and her team revealed that some doctors appeared to be overusing lucrative vascular procedures, performing them on patients who may not have needed them, they received hostile pushback from across the profession.
How ProPublica and CareSet Investigated the Overuse of Vascular Procedures
Researchers warned that patients may be undergoing vascular procedures too soon or unnecessarily. ProPublica and CareSet examined federal data to better understand how one treatment is being used.
Thousands of Patients May Be Undergoing Vascular Procedures Too Soon or Unnecessarily
A new analysis of Medicare claims by ProPublica and CareSet found that atherectomies, a procedure to treat vascular disease, were performed on about 30,000 patients who had questionable need for them.