Health care reporting among SABEW winners
Health care reporting fared well in this year’s Society of American Business Editors and Writers Best in Business Writing competition as the business of health care took center stage in many publications and earned awards for both breaking news and in-depth packages. The health-related winners:
Breaking news
Real-time News Organizations
- Dow Jones Newswires: “Deep Coverage On Drug Deal”
- Reuters: “H1N1 Flu: The Global Story”
Enterprise
Small Publications
- Sarasota Herald-Tribune: “Contaminated Chinese drywall”
Weekly Publications
- Pittsburgh Business Times: “Eli Lilly details payments to docs”
Projects
Giant Publications
- The New York Times: “Toxic Waters”
Large Publications
- Dallas Morning News: “The Cost of Care”
Magazine Enterprise
Small
- Bloomberg Markets: “Big Pharma’s Crime Spree”
Project looks at high price of health care in Dallas
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Health data, Hot Health Headline
In their “The Cost of Care” package, Dallas Morning News reporters seek to explain why, as Jim Landers says in the lead of a key story, one of the nation’s largest cities is “broken market where doctors, hospitals and other providers shower patients with services of diminishing value but staggering cost.”
The problems are clear: The Dartmouth Atlas ranks Dallas as the 13th priciest health market in the nation, while new Census data gives Texans the dubious honor of living in the least-insured state in the nation. The whys and hows of these issues are trickier, but the Morning News wades into the health spending morass.
Dallas sees no relief in health care expenses as competition drives up costs
Jim Landers explores the paradox that health care in the city is expensive because there’s so much competition, and considers the contributions marketing and medical records make to health care costs. The piece includes an interesting profile of CIGNA regional president David Toomey’s attempts to rein in costs in the area.
Robert Garrett and Jason Roberson explain how everybody pays the price for the area’s super-low insurance coverage rates, and put an exact cost estimate, both financial and human, on the price of a high uninsured population.
Doctor-owned hospitals a lucrative practice, though opinions split on benefits
Gary Jacobson’s weighs the costs and benefits, both economic and medical, of doctor-owned hospitals, which are more common in Dallas than any other major metropolitan area.
Medical imaging a growth industry, but some say unneeded scans increase expenses
Ryan McNeill assesses just how useful the high-speed, unregulated growth of medical imaging has been for patients, doctors, investors and other stakeholders.
Critics see home health care boom as wasteful, but others tout benefits
When you’re looking to explain growing costs, it makes sense to focus your efforts on growing sectors, and Gregg Jones does just that, looking at the fast-growing home health sector. He leads with Medicare fraud, but then shows just how much deeper and more complicated the cost equation of home health care can get.
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The AHCJ-NLM Fellowships will give four journalists the chance to spend a week on the campus of the National Institutes of Health learning about research and data from NIH and NLM, biomedical statistics, programs and resources and get hands-on training. Applications due Aug. 2.
- Reporting on the intersection of health, environment
- Tip sheet: Covering cuts to Medicare reimbursements
- Briefing: Reporting on health reform between now and 2014
- Covering high-risk insurance pools: Tips for reporters
- Health care reform has passed: What's next?
- Health and education: Covering these intersecting beats
- Reporting on the business of health care
- Health reporting resources for journalists on state and local government beats
