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.
A Month in to Healthcare.gov, Real-Life Winners and Losers
Today marks one month since the disastrous start of Healthcare.gov, and we take a look at whose winning and losing in real life because of it.
Health Policy Canceled? What We Know and Don’t Know
Hundreds of thousands of individual policyholders, at minimum, will have to find new plans as insurers respond to new coverage requirements under Obamacare. But is that necessarily bad?
Health-Care Rollout: The View From Kansas
Q&A with Sandy Praeger, a Republican insurance commissioner in a state that’s refused to go along with the Affordable Care Act.
Sebelius Testifies: Four Things to Know About Today’s Obamacare Hearing
Among the proferred questions for HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius: Why has no one been fired?
The Affordable Care Act’s Most Important Date: Not What You Think
Forgotten amid the controversial health exchange rollout: The deep impact of last year’s Supreme Court ruling letting states opt out of expanding Medicaid.
Today’s Obamacare Hearing: What You Need To Know
A House committee focuses on what went wrong with the Healthcare.gov rollout and why. Here’s the backstory.
Should Hospital Ratings Be Embraced — or Despised?
Can patients trust the many websites that rate hospitals? ProPublica’s Charles Ornstein talks to health-care reporters and editors to find out.
Healthcare.gov’s Users Speak Out: 'Clean This Mess Up'
Health and Human Services asked for comments about its website. It got them by the hundreds. Consumers and insurance agents say they were stymied, and one applicant said he and his wife were wrongly listed as incarcerated — then denied.
Is Healthcare.gov the Future? We Ask a Health Futurist
“The metaphor is the Wright Brothers, not the Indianapolis 500,” says Ian Morrison. “Let’s just get this sucker up in the air before we declare that flying is a bad idea.”