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.
Deadline? What Deadline? The Obamacare Sign-up Dates Keep Moving
Confusion reigns as state and federal officials allow people to find and pay for new health insurance plans.
GlaxoSmithKline to Quit Paying Doctors for Promotional Talks
The sixth-largest drug maker already had begun cutting back on paid speaking, ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs database shows.
Obamacare Q&A: Fears of a Premium 'Death Spiral' Overstated
Kaiser Foundation expert predicts that, “What we’ll start to see in January are the real effects of the law, rather than the more hypothetical ones we’ve been talking about up until now.”
Turning the Corner? In California, At Least, Obamacare Sign-Ups Zoom
New York also sees a surge in Affordable Care Act enrollments as the deadline approaches for coverage starting Jan. 1.
The Obamacare Paper Pileup
Oregon, California and other states are clogged with backlogs of paper applications that some fear might not be approved before the Dec. 23 deadline to sign up for health insurance.
Payment Due: The Obamacare Deadline No One Is Talking About
Analysts say that excluding holidays, people enrolling in new health care plans by the Dec. 23 deadline have only a few days to pay their first premium. Missing the deadline could create a coverage gap for those converting from an old plan to a new one, or delay coverage for the uninsured.
As HealthCare.gov Rebounds, New Glitches Hit Medicaid Enrollments
Enrollees who don’t qualify for Medicaid are being told they do, and processing delays could keep some who are eligible for Medicaid out of the program in early 2014.
HealthCare.gov’s Mysterious New Number: ‘834’
With the website working better on the consumer front, attention has turned to whether insurance companies are actually getting enrollment information — what tekkies call “834” data.
Test Run No. 2: HealthCare.gov’s Invisible Health Plans
Performance issues continue to dog the federal government’s updated health care marketplace. Live chat helper: “Yes, others are experiencing the same problem.”
For Uninsured Missouri Reporter, Obamacare Is a Real-Life Story
Harum Helmy fell through a crack created by last year’s Supreme Court decision allowing states to avoid expanding Medicaid. Now, she is among millions who earn less than the poverty level but can’t get subsidized private insurance.