STAT News wins awards for health insurance coverage

STAT News executive editor Rick Berke posted the following:

Dear Readers,

Please bear with me as I brag about two of STAT’s most accomplished (and humble) reporters: Casey Ross and Bob Herman.

This week they won the Batten Medal, one of the most prestigious awards in American journalism, for their series revealing an explicit strategy by the nation’s largest health insurer to use a flawed computer algorithm to increase profits in its Medicare Advantage business at the expense of vulnerable older Americans.

Their stories about UnitedHealth also won the NIHCM Award for investigative and general reporting, an extraordinarily competitive prize in health care journalism. It was a finalist for several other top journalism prizes, including the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, the 2023 Investigative Reporters & Editors Awards, and the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing “Best in Business” Awards.

This recognition is important to us because it shows that, though we are a relatively young media company, we are operating at the very highest levels of our profession. From the start, our mission has been to deliver trusted and authoritative coverage of health and medicine that pulls no punches. Some of those we cover may be unhappy about our stories, but we hope they respect our fair and meticulous reporting.

As the judges for the Batten Prize wrote of the Ross/Herman series, which had immediate and far-reaching impacts in Congress, federal agencies, courts, and even inside UnitedHealth, “STAT made a difference in the lives of patients across the nation by having the courage to pursue such a difficult story and the compassion to help those who were so callously treated by the nation’s largest health insurer.”

Such journalism is tremendously costly and difficult to produce. Ross and Herman worked on this project for most of last year. So I’d be grateful if you’d consider a subscription to STAT+ to support our work. Most of our biggest exclusives are published behind our paywall, as was the UnitedHealth series. And there are many more impactful stories coming very soon.

Read more here.