3 ms·

Kliff's approach to covering healthcare is nothing short of miraculous. She's killing it on all fronts—dominating the beat as far as traditional reporting techn

Kliff's approach to covering healthcare is nothing short of miraculous. She's killing it on all fronts—dominating the beat as far as traditional reporting techniques, innovating new ways (like this) to unearth information, and on top of it, communicating an intricate and sometimes abstract area of public policy in a way that anyone can understand and relate to. In general, I think vox.com is underrated. But Kliff in particular stands out.

fishtoaster 8y ago
I love vox.com's depth (which their clickbaity headlines belie). Their podcast, The Weeds (where they get into, of course, the weeds of policy topics) is among my favorites. They are a little too liberal for my tastes, sometimes. I mean, I'm at least that liberal myself, but I sometimes feel I'm just getting the side of the story that caters to my existing beliefs from Vox. Sarah Kliff's reporting, specifically, though, has always stood out as unusually excellent to me. It doesn't seem to suffer from that problem as much as some other Vox reporters I like (eg Matthew Yglesias). Her healthcare coverage, of course, is supurb, but there's also great stuff like her piece[0] on the wage gap. [0] https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-explained https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-explai...
joe_the_user 8y ago
While Kliff's work seems good, the title has the "Helping X, one Y at a time" problem. The actually state of affairs is that arbitrary hospital bills are a problem that won't be solved one hospital at a time but rather are going require regulation, not just on all hospitals but of health care broadly.
- tialaramex 8y ago
  The one Y at a time approach brings _transparency_ as mentioned in the title. Once there's transparency the conversation is more likely to be about the facts because that's what everybody can see. When you don't have transparency what happens is that everybody can bring their own anecdotes, maybe baseless, and you can watch as a group "wins the argument" based on claims _you_ know are spurious, because even though their position is unsupportable on the facts, nobody had those facts. So, you're right that Kliff's work doesn't itself fix the problem, but what it does is document the problem unmistakeably so that this thread has fewer people saying "I don't think that can be right, my friend's sister knew someone who worked in an ER and they never charge that much". Back in technology the Certificate Transparency system doesn't itself solve any problems per se. But it delivers transparency, and that has allowed clean-ups to happen in years that would undoubtedly have taken decades to complete without transparency. It still requires a Will in the right place to solve the problem, for example CT's effectiveness is in good part dependant on Mozilla. Would Google step up to the plate and do the same job if Mozilla didn't exist? Maybe, or maybe for political reasons as a for-profit they would fail. Certainly Symantec's leadership believed that going over our heads to Google management would get them what they wanted, but unless what they wanted was "Get out of this business" that does not seem to have worked. But the good news is that for healthcare Americans can vote to put that Will in place in your country.

fishtoaster 8y ago

I love vox.com's depth (which their clickbaity headlines belie). Their podcast, The Weeds (where they get into, of course, the weeds of policy topics) is among my favorites. They are a little too liberal for my tastes, sometimes. I mean, I'm at least that liberal myself, but I sometimes feel I'm just getting the side of the story that caters to my existing beliefs from Vox. Sarah Kliff's reporting, specifically, though, has always stood out as unusually excellent to me. It doesn't seem to suffer from that problem as much as some other Vox reporters I like (eg Matthew Yglesias). Her healthcare coverage, of course, is supurb, but there's also great stuff like her piece[0] on the wage gap. [0] https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-explained https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-explai...

joe_the_user 8y ago

While Kliff's work seems good, the title has the "Helping X, one Y at a time" problem. The actually state of affairs is that arbitrary hospital bills are a problem that won't be solved one hospital at a time but rather are going require regulation, not just on all hospitals but of health care broadly.

tialaramex 8y ago
The one Y at a time approach brings _transparency_ as mentioned in the title. Once there's transparency the conversation is more likely to be about the facts because that's what everybody can see. When you don't have transparency what happens is that everybody can bring their own anecdotes, maybe baseless, and you can watch as a group "wins the argument" based on claims _you_ know are spurious, because even though their position is unsupportable on the facts, nobody had those facts. So, you're right that Kliff's work doesn't itself fix the problem, but what it does is document the problem unmistakeably so that this thread has fewer people saying "I don't think that can be right, my friend's sister knew someone who worked in an ER and they never charge that much". Back in technology the Certificate Transparency system doesn't itself solve any problems per se. But it delivers transparency, and that has allowed clean-ups to happen in years that would undoubtedly have taken decades to complete without transparency. It still requires a Will in the right place to solve the problem, for example CT's effectiveness is in good part dependant on Mozilla. Would Google step up to the plate and do the same job if Mozilla didn't exist? Maybe, or maybe for political reasons as a for-profit they would fail. Certainly Symantec's leadership believed that going over our heads to Google management would get them what they wanted, but unless what they wanted was "Get out of this business" that does not seem to have worked. But the good news is that for healthcare Americans can vote to put that Will in place in your country.