The NIHCM Awards

I was flabbergasted to learn a couple of weeks ago that I'd won the National Institute of Health Care Management (NIHCM) award for digital healthcare journalism, announced today, along with winners in print, trade, broadcast and research.  For me, being named a finalist in the company of top healthcare journalists -- and scholar-journalists -- was win enough.

In the digital category, finalists included two scholars doubling as bloggers and journalists, Austin Frakt and Nicholas Bagley, who have helped to educate me and whom I rely on as sources; Margot Sanger-Katz, who is breaking new ground in data journalism at the New York Times' Upshot; and a lineup of equally impressive reporters. Their entries, with links, are here. Here are the winners in each category:

John Carreyrou & Mike Siconolfi, "Testing Theranos," The Wall Street Journal

Emily Anthes, “Save Blood, Save Lives” & “The Trouble with Checklists,” Nature

Daniel Zwerdling, Robert Little, Nicole Beemsterboer, Barbara Van Woerkon, Robert Benincasa, Samantha Sunne & Lydia Emmanouilidou, “Injured Nurses,” NPR

Andrew Sprung, “When Silver Is Worth More Than Gold or Platinum” (posts 2, 3, 4), xpostfactoid

Martin Hackmann, Jonathan Kolstad & Amanda Kowalski, “Adverse Selection and the Individual Mandate: When Theory Meets Practice,” American Economic Review

My own entry was a cluster of posts focusing on what's been a central preoccupation of mine in my tracking of ACA implementation: the factors that lead low income marketplace enrollees to access or forgo the Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) subsidies that are available only with silver plans. I've focused on CSR, as I noted in this compendium of posts on the subject, because these secondary, semi-hidden subsidies constitute the ACA marketplace's best defense against underinsurance. Most who are eligible access CSR, but too many don't, and the price is too high for too many.