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.
Top Medicare Official: ‘We Can and Should Do More' to Oversee Drug Plan
Under pressure, Medicare's director tells a Senate panel the agency will intensify the search for abusive prescribing patterns and undertake other reforms.
Top Medicare Prescribers Rake In Speaking Fees From Drugmakers
Pay-to-prescribe is illegal, but doctors say they haven’t been influenced by the money they get for promoting drugs they also prescribe to large numbers of their patients.
Not Authorized to Prescribe Drugs? Medicare Pays Anyway.
Massage therapists, athletic trainers, interpretersand others who aren’t allowed to write prescriptions apparently issued at least417,000 under Medicare.
Inspector General Faults Medicare for Not Tracking 'Extreme' Prescribers
Echoing a ProPublica investigation, a report finds hundreds of doctors with questionable and potentially dangerous prescribing patterns. In a response, Medicare says it will step up monitoring and review the list for fraud or abuse.
A Father’s Day Remembrance
When his father dies just months after his mother, a reporter searches for answers and discovers the "widowhood effect."
Eight Ways to Strengthen Medicare’s Drug Benefit
Former government officials, analysts and researchers say Medicare could improve oversight of its Part D drug benefit with these steps.
How We Analyzed Medicare’s Drug Data
ProPublica obtained Medicare Part D data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) under the Freedom of Information Act. Here follows more information about the data and how we analyzed it.
Prescriber Checkup
Medicare’s popular prescription-drug program serves more than 42 million people and pays for more than one of every four prescriptions written nationwide. Use this tool to find and compare doctors and other providers in Part D in 2015.
Medicare Drug Program Fails to Monitor Prescribers, Putting Seniors and Disabled at Risk
Prescription data obtained by ProPublica shows wide use of antipsychotics, narcotics and other drugs dangerous for older adults, but Medicare officials say it's not their job to look for unsafe prescribing or weed out doctors with troubled backgrounds.
Dollars for Docs Mints a Millionaire
New data show drugmakers’ payments to hundreds of thousands of doctors, and some have made well over $500,000.