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.
How Mom’s Death Changed My Thinking About End-of-Life Care
One-fourth of Medicare spending occurs in the final year of life. But behind the oft-cited statistic are real families making agonizing decisions with outcomes that can’t be reversed.
Feds to Publicize Drug and Device Company Payments to Doctors Next Year
After a long delay, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services published final rules for the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which would bring transparency to financial relationships between physicians and industry.
Feds Release Nursing Home Inspections, Free of Censor’s Marks
The unredacted documents include patients’ ages, medical conditions, medications and other data omitted from inspection reports on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services website.
Two Deaths, Wildly Different Penalties: The Big Disparities in Nursing Home Oversight
ProPublica’s updated Nursing Home Inspect tool shows that government fails to ensure consistent penalties for nursing homes in different states.
Nursing Home Inspect
We've updated our app with new data and a new design, making it easier to find nursing home problems in your state.
The 10 Most Common Nursing Home Violations
We’ve updated our searchable Nursing Home Inspect database to cover more than a quarter million deficiencies found at U.S. nursing homes.
High-Prescribing Chicago Psychiatrist Faces Federal Fraud Suit
Dr. Michael Reinstein, subject of a 2009 investigation by ProPublica and The Chicago Tribune, is accused of taking kickbacks while providing antipsychotics to thousands of indigent nursing home patients.
New York’s Ongoing Blackout: Hospitals in Lower Manhattan
There is no firm timetable on the return of some of New York's largest hospitals. And concern is rising that the patchwork system can't last for long.