healthcare cost investigation

I went on Reddit on Aug. 24 with our partners, investigative reporter and anchor Lee Zurik at WVUE FOX 8 Live and  Jed Lipinski  at NOLA.com I The Times-Picayune, to do an “AMA” or “Ask Me Anything” open forum.

To read the whole AMA, go here.  Here’s one exchange:

[–]B4UGOTHERE 1 point 

Where did you get the big balls to go against a conglomerate like this? And also, may I thank you for your big balls (or ovaries if applicable)?

[–]NOLAnews[S] 2 points 

From Jeanne Pinder:

Wow, thank you so much! Balls and ovaries, both.

And we are doing this because there’s no excuse for all this secrecy. People should know what stuff costs in health care. Period.

[–]B4UGOTHERE 1 point 

It would be nice.

[–]NOLAnews[S] 2 points 

Jed: Well thanks. And good question. I think they came partly from our partnership with ClearHealthCosts, whose team did the tedious and frustrating but crusading work of reaching out to every major health provider and clinic in the greater NOLA area and asking for the cash prices of their most common procedures. They then helped us create an online database to store the data they received, so we could begin writing stories off that data, which elicited more data from consumers, etc. It’s a magical formula for journalism, and a great way to take the powers that be by surprise.

To read more about the partnership, go here. We use shoe-leather journalism, data journalism and crowdsourcing to reveal the mysteries of pricing. This is a continuation of our national partnership strategy at ClearHealthCosts; to read about all our partnerships, go here.

Jeanne Pinder  is the founder and CEO of ClearHealthCosts. She worked at The New York Times for almost 25 years as a reporter, editor and human resources executive, then volunteered for a buyout and founded...