Washington Post hires Rowland to cover business of health care

Washington Post national economy and business editor David Cho, deputy business editor Zachary Goldfarb and business assignment editor Suzanne Goldenberg sent out the following announcement on Friday:

We’re delighted to announce that Christopher Rowland, the Washington bureau chief of the Boston Globe, will join us to cover the business of health care.

The job marks a homecoming of sorts for Chris, who is returning to reporting on a beat he loves after nearly 10 years as an editor and writer in Washington.

At the Globe, Chris has led a five-person D.C. bureau that has distinguished itself with its political journalism. He has written stand-out stories about the risks facing patients from a rush to embrace electronic health records and the utter dysfunction at the Federal Election Commission. Chris was part of the team that won the 2013 Everett McKinley Dirksen award for reporting on congressional gridlock. Previously, he was the metro political editor in Boston.

As a reporter on the business of health care beat from 2003-2007, Chris wrote hard-hitting stories on pork-barrel spending in Medicare and questionable conduct at dialysis clinics. His enduring enthusiasm about the subject was evident – and contagious — in conversations with us and in his beat memo, where he described taking on a health care system that’s “dysfunctional, riven with waste, plagued by conflicts of interest and hidden financial influence, subject to countless white-collar criminal schemes, and sorely lacking in transparency.”

Chris began his career as a political writer for the Providence Journal in Rhode Island and a reporter for the Brattleboro Reformer in Vermont. A graduate of the University of Arizona and former editor of the Arizona Daily Wildcat, Chris lives in the District with his wife and their daughter. His two older daughters live in Brooklyn.