Op-Ed

To support Tarbell and join Wendell Potter in our second year of publishing, please visit secure.tarbell.org. All donations made through Dec. 31, 2018 will be doubled.

In the 1960s, with no funding for long-term, chronic dialysis, hospital committees decided who would live and die. It was the federal government that put an end to this practice.

Many Medicare Advantage plans have small networks and high deductibles. If you go out of network, even unknowingly, you will be on the hook for a lot of money out of your own pocket.

You have no guarantee that the doctors and hospitals that the insurance company say are in your network will still be there in the future. And you, not the insurer, get stuck with a the big bill. 

"Even I was dismayed when I learned I'd have to go into an NHS hospital."

The new Martin Shkreli is Nostrum Laboratories’ Nirmal Mulye – who raised the price of a bladder infection antibiotic from $475 a bottle to nearly $2,400 a bottle.

 Wise, Virginia is not a place that’s easy to get to. It’s 50 miles from the nearest interstate and almost 70 miles from the nearest commercial airport. And regardless of where you start from on your way to Wise—a town of 3,000 people in the Southern Appalachians—you’ll have to...

America’s biggest corporations—prescription drug distributors in particular—are playing in our growing opioid epidemic.

Were it not for the business practices of some of the biggest corporations in America that profit from the manufacture and distribution of massive quantities of opioids, many of those we have lost likely would still be with us. How are those big corporations responding? In one notable case...

The following is an editorial from Tarbell Founder Wendell Potter. It joins hundreds of other news organizations this Thursday in refuting attacks on a free press and calling for renewed support of journalism in the public interest. The Tarbell editorial is followed by a reprinting of a note from...

Which one will be first?

Chances are, you saw a headline or heard a report that went something like this: Expanding Medicare to cover all Americans would cost $32.6 trillion dollars. If I was still a flack for the health insurance industry, I would have worked hard behind the scenes to make sure you saw...

Insurance company CEOs and their shareholders, that’s who.

Studies show life expectancy in the United States is going down while it continues to go up in other developed countries.

I’ve been asked many times if there was one thing, one moment, that led me to leave my job at a big health insurance corporation. Yes, there was, and it occurred five days before Christmas in 2007. That was when a beautiful 17-year-old girl named Nataline Sarkisyan passed away,...

As the support for a single-payer, “Medicare-for-All” health care system in U.S. grows, so do the contributions from the health insurance industry.

Eleven years ago today, while I was still serving as head of corporate communications for Cigna, I flew from Philadelphia to Sacramento to attend the first U.S. screening of a new documentary, Michael Moore’s SiCKO. It never occurred to me as I walked into the historic Crest Theatre that...

Across the country, expanding the dental workforce to include dental therapists is one of a very few health care proposals that attracts support from lawmakers in both parties.

Yes, Novartis secretly paid Trump lawyer Michael Cohen $1.2 million to gain insights into the president’s thinking on health care. But there is more to it.

Five years ago, a bipartisan bill that would have allowed Americans to order U.S.-made prescription medicines from Canada, where drug prices are much lower, went down to a bipartisan defeat despite widespread public support—just as it has every time the idea has been considered by Congress over almost two...