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 Death in Slow Motion
James “Lee” Lewis arrived at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center on New Year’s Day to get a new heart. He died three months later after a failed transplant and nearly 20 follow-up surgeries and procedures.
At St. Luke’s in Houston, Patients Suffer as a Renowned Heart Transplant Program Loses Its Luster
The hospital and its legendary surgeon Denton Cooley performed some of the world’s first heart transplants back in the 1960s. In recent years, though, it has had some of the worst heart transplant outcomes in the country.
As Wait for New Heart Got Longer, Patient Grew Sicker
Baylor St. Luke’s in Houston was known for handling complex heart transplants. But when Travis Hogan was a patient there, he didn’t know that the program was undergoing a series of dramatic changes. He never got his heart.
Help Us Investigate Care at the Texas Medical Center
If you’re a patient, doctor, administrator, vendor or visitor, we’d like to hear from you about your experience at the largest medical complex in the world.
Measuring the Toll of the Opioid Epidemic Is Tougher Than It Seems
One of our editors set out to create an ambitious list of data sources on the opioid epidemic. Much of what he found was out of date, and some data contradicted other data.
The Price They Pay
ProPublica and The New York Times have partnered to tell the stories of Americans living daily with the reality of high-cost drugs. There are millions of others just like them.
We’ve Updated Our Treatment Tracker
Our database now includes records from 2015. Look up your doctor and other providers in the Medicare Part B program.
When Buying Prescription Drugs, Some Pay More With Insurance Than Without It
As insurers ask consumers to pay a greater share of their drug costs, it may be cheaper to pay cash than use your insurance card. One expert estimates that consumers could be overpaying for as many as 1 in 10 prescriptions.
How to Save Money on Your Prescription Drugs
Online prescription sites may help you find cheaper prices for some drugs, sometimes without using your insurance.