Charles Ornstein
Charles Ornstein is managing editor, local, overseeing ProPublica’s local initiatives. These include offices in the Midwest, South, Southwest and Northwest, a joint initiative with the Texas Tribune, and the Local Reporting Network, which works with local news organizations to produce accountability journalism on issues of importance to their communities.
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Charles Ornstein is managing editor, local, overseeing ProPublica’s local initiatives. These include offices in the Midwest, South, Southwest and Northwest, a joint initiative with the Texas Tribune, and the Local Reporting Network, which works with local news organizations to produce accountability journalism on issues of importance to their communities. From 2008 to 2017, he was a senior reporter covering health care and the pharmaceutical industry. He 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. In 2004, he and Tracy Weber were lead authors on a series on Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, a troubled hospital in South Los Angeles. The articles won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for public service, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service.
In 2009, he and Weber worked on a series of stories that detailed serious failures in oversight by the California Board of Registered Nursing and nursing boards around the country. The work was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Projects edited or co-edited by Ornstein have won the Pulitzer Prize for public service, the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, the Scripps Howard Impact Award, the IRE Award, the Online Journalism Award and other major journalism honors.
He previously worked at the Dallas Morning News, where he covered health care on the business desk and worked in the Washington bureau. Ornstein is a past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists and an adjunct journalism professor at Columbia University. Ornstein is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
Journalists Turn to Themselves for Obamacare Stories
After months of hype and hysteria, insurance policies purchased under the Affordable Care Act went into effect on New Year’s Day, and journalists have largely pivoted from writing about the problems of HealthCare.gov to how the law is actually working for consumers.
Obamacare: A Midterm Report Card
The Obama administration has released enrollment statistics for the first three months. There’s much we now know, but even more that we don’t.
No Easy Definition for 'Abusive' Prescribing
As Medicare considers banning doctors who pose a “threat to the health or safety” of patients, it plans to consider an array of factors.
Big Data + Big Pharma = Big Money
New disclosures from data broker IMS Health reveal how much pharmaceutical firms will pay to know what your doctor is prescribing.
In A Major Shift, Medicare Wants Power to Ban Harmful Prescribers
Action follows ProPublica’s investigative series detailing inappropriate and wasteful prescribing, fraud in the nation’s biggest prescription drug program.
Caught Up in a Medicare Drug Fraud
The long list of medications on Joyce Heap’s insurance forms didn’t look right. It turns out they weren’t — and Medicare didn’t seem to care.
Medicare Moves to Tighten Oversight of Prescribers
Action comes after ProPublica uses the government’s own data to find patterns of dangerous prescribing, waste and potential fraud in Medicare Part D.
Senators Press Medicare for Answers on Drug Program
They ask federal officials to take a hard look at Medicare’s popular prescription drug program after ProPublica reports about fraud and waste that have cost taxpayers billions.
Stuck in Limbo With Breast Cancer as the Obamacare Deadline Looms
In New Jersey, people who believe they’ve qualified for Medicaid coverage under the health reform law might not actually be enrolled.
‘Let the Crime Spree Begin’: How Fraud Flourishes in Medicare’s Drug Plan
The federal government does little to stop schemers from stealing from Medicare Part D, the program that provides prescription drugs to more than 36 million seniors and disabled people.