STAT News launching business of health care newsletter

STAT News business of health care reporter Bob Herman sent out the following:

I’m extremely excited to anchor STAT’s newest newsletter, Health Care Inc. If you sign up, I promise we will make good use of your time.

Every Monday, starting July 18, we’ll give you fresh reporting on the business of health care, an industry that has morphed into a $4 trillion creature that, by and large, chews and spits out patients. There’s no shortage of scientific feats, medical marvels, and big-hearted people providing care. But there’s also no shortage of cutthroat business practices, sky-high bills, and meaningless buzzwords, all of which feed that creature.

My pal Tara Bannow and I will do our best to keep things lively and interesting — reporting on everything from people trying to resurrect surprise medical bills, to hospitals propping up medical schools, to explaining health insurance “micro-groups.”

We have some experience around this beat. I’ve been covering health care for 11 years from my home base in Indiana, and Tara’s been doing it for nine. In fact, the reason I’ve been so committed to this specific beat within health care for as long as I have is because there’s so much money flowing around. Health care’s complex financial apparatus has led to a system that is as expensive, exploitative, and confusing as ever — and worthy of being held to account.

So send us confidential tips, documents, story ideas, memes, anything. We crave this stuff. And we’ll do our best to tell the stories about how money flows throughout this system.