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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged insurance

1. December 21, 2011 04:26 PM

   A Rate-Regulation Case Study in Pennsylvania

   When insurance rates are news—and when they are not

   By Trudy Lieberman

   What’s so interesting about insurance rate regulation, and why is it worth reporting on? The topic has everything to do with the ultimate fate of the national health reform law and the media’s unfortunately diminishing role as a watchdog over state government. Campaign Desk has kept an eye on rate coverage in hot spots like Maine, California, and Connecticut, where...

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2. March 15, 2011 01:01 AM

   Audit Notes: When a Loss Isn’t a Loss, Lehman, WSJ on Nukes

   By Ryan Chittum

   You're going to hear a lot about all the "losses" insurers are going to be taking on the catastrophe in Japan. For instance, this story in The Wall Street Journal today: Moody's: Insurers Face Heavy Losses But don't be confused: These losses don't actually mean the insurers are going to lose money in the profit-and-loss sense. It just means they're...

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3. November 20, 2012 12:15 PM

   Highway to the danger zone

   Following Sandy, HuffPo and NYT dig into the folly of coastal development

   By Curtis Brainard

   Hurricane Sandy renewed the media’s interest in the many foolish ways that we increase our vulnerability to extreme weather. There’s climate change, of course. That came up right away. But carbon pollution isn’t the only, or even the most immediate, thing that we’re doing to imperil ourselves. There’s also relentless, right-up-to-the-water’s-edge-in-a-floodplain coastal development. After focusing on global warming in the...

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4. May 10, 2011 04:08 PM

   Race to the Bottom

   A Times story illustrates a peril that is a virtue to some

   By Ryan Chittum

   The New York Times gave this piece as big a play as you'll see a non-news story get yesterday, going with a four-line, two-column headline atop page one. That's newspaper for This Story Is Important. The Times reports on how states are letting the insurance industry set up so-called captive companies whose sole purpose is to insure the parent insurance...

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5. September 6, 2011 12:58 PM

   Rate Regulation Blow-up in California

   WellPoint and co. win again

   By Trudy Lieberman

   The big news in health reform last week was the insurance industry’s victory in the California legislature, which scotched any possibility that the state—one of twenty-four that does not have power to reject rates regulators say are too high—would actually curb the industry’s excesses. Health reform advocates and consumer groups had hoped a rate regulation bill would give California’s insurance...

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6. June 21, 2012 01:40 PM

   Reporting from the battlefield, uninsured

   Freelancers on the frontlines operate with little to no institutional support

   By Alysia Santo

   While covering the uprising against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, photojournalist Anton Hammerl was shot and killed in an attack by government troops, leaving behind his wife, Penny Sukhraj, and three young children. Journalists Clare Gillis, James Foley, and Manuel Brabo, who had been traveling and reporting in Libya with Hammerl, were kidnapped and held captive for 44 days....

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7. May 1, 2012 10:34 AM

   Stories I’d like to see

   Military movers, insuring a pitcher’s arm, and lobbyists against federal travel caps

   By Steven Brill

   1. The $5 billion moving bill: Reports last week that the US had agreed with Japan to transfer 9,000 of its 19,000 troops out of Okinawa stated matter of factly that the move will cost $8.6 billion - that’s billion, or $955,000 per service member. Even with Japan paying $3.1 billion of the bill, that leaves the US with $5.5...

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8. June 3, 2011 10:43 AM

   The Intense Health Reform Drama in the Maine Legislature

   What are its implications for the rest of the nation?

   By Trudy Lieberman

   If the old political adage “as goes Maine, so goes the nation” has any currency these days, health insurers may have lost last year’s battle—but they’re winning the war. The intense drama in the Maine legislature the last few weeks shows that the political power of the insurance industry has not diminished one bit. Gov. Paul LePage and his fellow...

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