The New York Financial Writers’ Association announced at last night’s Financial Follies gala that STAT News has won the 2025 Impact Award for Distinguished Financial Journalism for “Denied by AI.”
The four-part series, reported by Casey Ross and Bob Herman, helped change the national public conversation about the use of AI in health care by exposing how algorithms have been used by insurers, including UnitedHealth Group companies, to override decisions by physicians.
This practice slashed medical care for many patients while boosting insurers’ profits. The series helped spur a major Senate investigation focused on the use of AI and predictive technologies by the nation’s three largest Medicare Advantage insurers: UnitedHealth Group, Humana and CVS/Aetna. A second follow-up inquiry by the same Senate committee is now underway.
The series also spurred inquiries into health insurers by Democratic and Republican congressmen, and two major class-action lawsuits, one against UnitedHealth/NaviHealth and the second against Humana. The series also sparked an internal probe by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which proposed limits on the use of AI and predictive technologies and issued guidance further clarifying how those tools can be used.
The Impact Award is unique in financial journalism in that it focuses on the impact of a body of work, irrespective of when the story or stories were published. The impact of the submission can be immediate or spread over a period of several years, but the impact must be measurably significant in the eyes of the jurors.
Past recipients of the award include reporters at ProPublica, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes and BuzzFeed News, and the Financial Times. STAT, this year’s winner, reports on health, life science, medicine and biotech news and has 2 million monthly unique
