Joanna Cosgrove01.01.09
Preserving the Power of Healthcare Information
Kaiser Health News will report on the complex facets of the U.S. healthcare system.
By Joanna Cosgrove
Online Editor
The new venture is headquartered at Kaiser’s Washington, D.C. building and helmed by executive editors Laurie McGinley and Peggy Girshman, two veteran journalists who have spent years covering healthcare.
Ms. McGinley is the former deputy bureau chief for global economics and national healthcare policy correspondent at The Wall Street Journal. She was also part of a reporting team that earned a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage on AIDS.
Ms. Girshman is an Emmy winning editor and producer, former managing editor of National Public Radio and an executive editor at Congressional Quarterly and a two-time Peabody award winner for health policy coverage.
Ms. Girshman explained the factors that inspired the creation of KHN center, the evolution of the news business, and the resulting journalistic fallout that’s come because of it. “As time went on it became clear that papers, especially newspapers, are laying off people and if they even had anybody covering health policy, they no longer do, with the exception of a just a few of big news organizations such as NPR, The New York Times and The Washington Post,” she said.
“The cutbacks in the news business have severely affected coverage of national policy debates,” said Kaiser’s Matt James, senior vice president for media and public education. “The non-profit sector can play a unique role in making sure that the public has continued access to in-depth reporting on complex policy issues. And it is our hope to do just that in the area of healthcare, an issue that affects everyone.”
As the coverage continues to disappear, so too do the reporters steeped in health policy expertise. “If the stuff is dropping out of papers and people are losing the knowledge (or if you’re losing the people who have the knowledge), then the level of conversation will be diminished,” she said. “Our basic mission is one of communication—to better the national conversation about healthcare. Not better in one direction, but more informed.”
The current focus of KHN is not “across the board health,” rather it’s about health policy, health reform, healthcare financing and generally how the system works. “We’re not covering the FDA, for example. It’s more about how people get healthcare and the various players in that world, and of course, as the debate starts on Capitol Hill, how that figures in,” explained Ms. Girshman. “It would cover nutraceuticals not in terms of medicine (we don’t cover medicines or treatments at all). If there was an issue, for instance, should Medicare Part B pay for them, then we would go there.
“Medical stuff is still getting covered by news organizations. Policy is not,” she continued. “Policy affects every single person and that’s what we care about: how do people get healthcare, who’s making the decisions, how are they making the decisions, why and what are the factors influencing it.”
The centerpiece of KHN is in-depth articles on new developments in the healthcare system and on healthcare initiatives and debates in Washington and in state capitals. Ms. Girshman said KHN has already commissioned freelance articles in this vein, the first of which was published last week in The Washington Post. Supplementing the stories will be columns, video interviews, graphics and multimedia features, as well as a daily synthesis of news stories from around the country.
“We are committed to making KHN a unique home and distribution vehicle for the very best in-depth journalism on health issues, a place people and other news organizations can go for stories and the most important changes occurring in healthcare and often mind-numbingly complex health policy debates,” said Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation. "Journalists who work for KHN will have resources for research and travel to get out and cover stories where they are happening, and they will not have to compete with stories on other issues for space in the paper or time on air.”
In addition to its original articles, KHN also creates daily “aggregate” stories about current health policy hot topics. Rather than simply listing multiple headlines associated with a single topic, each story consists of a topic summary as covered by various institutions, producing a multi-faceted appeal. The articles are both posted on KHN’s website and mailed to subscribers free of charge. “It’s important to get maximum information out there,” Ms. Girshman commented.
KHN’s preliminary website is currently online, however the full site with regular content isn’t expected to go live until April. All news content will be available for free on the website, www.kaiserhealthnews.org.