As a senior correspondent for KFF Health News (previously called Kaiser Health News), I cover a wide range of national health stories, from COVID-19 to mental health, substance use and suicide. I work on both long-term investigative projects, as well as enterprise and shorter-term feature stories.

KFF Health News is a nonprofit news service committed to in-depth coverage of healthcare policy and politics. It provides all its content free to other news organizations and the public. As such, my stories have appeared on CNN, NPR, PolitiFact, the Guardian, and many other local and national outlets.

KFF Health News is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation. (Neither the newsroom nor the foundation has any affiliation with the health insurance company Kaiser Permanente.) 

$50 Billion in Opioid Settlement Cash Is on the Way. We’re Tracking How It’s Spent.

Spending the money effectively and equitably is a tall order for state and local governments, and a lack of transparency in the process is already leading to fears of misuse. Our investigation found only 12 states have committed to detailed public reporting of all their spending.

My sources and I joined NPR’s 1A for an hour-long discussion on this topic.

How Are States Spending Opioid Settlement Cash? We Built a Database of Answers

A year-long investigation involving dozens of interviews, thousands of pages of documents, an array of public records requests, and outreach to all 50 states resulted in a first-of-its kind database that catalogs more than 7,000 ways opioid settlement cash was used in 2022 and 2023. It’s the most comprehensive resource to date tracking some of the largest public health settlements in American history.

From Narcan to Gun Silencers, Opioid Settlement Cash Pays Law Enforcement Tabs

The Payback series includes the annual creation of the only national database detailing how jurisdictions spend opioid settlement money — a joint undertaking with researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Shatterproof, a nonprofit focused on addiction. We found $61 million went to law enforcement in 2024, including to buy rifle silencers and drones. Many questioned whether those had any connection to healing the addiction crisis.

I spoke about the investigation on CBS News.

‘They See a Cash Cow’: Corporations Could Consume $50 Billion of Opioid Settlements

As opioid settlement dollars land in government coffers, a swarm of businesses are positioning themselves to profit from the windfall. But will their potential gains come at the expense of the settlements’ intended purpose — to remediate the effects of the opioid epidemic?

One Pennsylvania county is spending $1 million on drug disposal patches. At least two cities are buying BolaWraps for police. The device shoots out a wire that wraps around a person’s torso or legs to detain them.

I dug into these issues for an article and social media video.

Supreme Court Upends Purdue Pharma Opioid Settlement

When the Supreme Court struck down a $6 billion bankruptcy plan from Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, confusion was rampant. What would this mean for victims of the opioid crisis and state governments that were expecting settlement payments? What did it mean for corporate accountability? My team at KFF Health News and I took a novel approach to provide answers. Instead of writing an article, we produced a social-media first story through a series of slides on Instagram, giving readers a clear, distilled version of the day’s breaking news.

Medical Debt Sunk Her Credit. New Changes From the Credit Reporting Agencies Won’t Help.

Penny Wingard, 58, of Charlotte, North Carolina, worries she won’t ever get out from under her medical debt despite new policies that are supposed to prevent medical debt from harming people’s credit scores.

I followed Wingard for nearly a year to report both a written story and an audio feature for NPR illustrating the ways medical debt has impacted her daily life, work prospects, relationships, and mental health.

How Banks and Private Equity Cash In When Patients Can’t Pay Their Medical Bills

As Americans are overwhelmed with medical bills, patient financing is now a multibillion-dollar business, with private equity and big banks lined up to cash in when patients and their families can’t pay for care.

Hospitals and other providers, which historically put their patients in interest-free payment plans, have welcomed the financing, signing contracts with lenders and enrolling patients in financing plans with rosy promises about convenient bills and easy payments.

For patients, the payment plans often mean something more ominous: yet more debt.

Pandemic Unveils Growing Suicide Crisis for Communities of Color

In 2021, there was a collective sigh of relief when the CDC announced that — despite the mental health impacts of Covid-19 — the national suicide rate had declined. However, that was not the full picture. Suicide rates actually increased for Black, Hispanic, and other communities of color in many states during the pandemic.

Interviews with a dozen suicide researchers, data requests to all 50 states, and a review of decades of research revealed that suicide is a growing crisis for communities of color — one that plagued them well before the pandemic and has only been exacerbated since.

I collected audio for this story too, which was featured in a 17-minute piece on Science Friday.

OSHA Let Employers Decide Whether to Report Health Care Worker Deaths. Many Didn’t.

Four workers died at a facility with one of the largest U.S. outbreaks, but the Occupational Safety and Health Administration never conducted an inspection. It’s a pattern that’s played out across the country.

My colleagues and I examined more than 240 deaths of health care workers and found that employers did not report more than one-third of them to a state or federal OSHA office, many based on internal decisions that the deaths were not work-related — conclusions that were not independently reviewed.

This story was part of a package that won the NLA’s 2021 Batten Medal for Coverage of the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Addiction Treatment Providers in Pa. Face Little State Scrutiny Despite Harm to Clients

Pennsylvania’s Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs has allowed providers to continue operating despite repeated violations and harm to clients.

More than 80 interviews and a review of thousands of pages of state government and court records revealed that the department lacks resources and regulatory power, uses an inherently flawed oversight system that does little to ensure high-quality or effective care, and rarely takes strong disciplinary action against facilities when so many Pennsylvanians need services.

This story won the Institute for Nonprofit News’ 2021 award for “Best Investigative Journalism.”

An HIV Outbreak in Maine Shows the Risk of Trump’s Crackdown on Homelessness and Drug Use

Public health experts and advocates say the outbreak has been fueled by a confluence of local factors, including the sweeping of a homeless encampment and shuttering of a sterile-syringe program. But those issues may not remain local for long. The Trump administration is leading efforts to promote similar tactics nationwide.

How ERs Fail Patients With Addiction: One Patient’s Tragic Death

Two intractable failings of the U.S. health care system — addiction treatment and medical costs — come to a head in the ER, where patients desperate for addiction treatment arrive, only to find the facility may not be equipped to deal with substance use or, if they are, treatment is prohibitively expensive.

About nine months after publication, the South Carolina hospital at the center of this article signed a contract with the state to improve its addiction care policies and training in the ER.

Workplace Mental Health at Risk as Key Federal Agency Faces Cuts

Efforts to decrease alarmingly high rates of suicide among construction workers and prevent burnout in health care workers are in jeopardy after the firing of hundreds of employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.