Lizzie Presser covers health, inequality and how policy is experienced at ProPublica. She was previously a contributing writer for The California Sunday Magazine, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, This American Life and others. Her story “The Dispossessed,” published in partnership with The New Yorker, won the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting and the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism in 2020. She is a two-time finalist for the Livingston Award and the National Magazine Award.
The bills come after ProPublica’s reporting on land passed down informally within families, known as heirs’ property. Representing about one-third of Black-owned land in the South, it can be ineligible for aid and vulnerable to forced sales.
ProPublica’s reporters want to talk to mental health providers, health insurance insiders and patients as we examine the U.S. mental health care system. If that’s you, reach out.
For his new documentary, “Silver Dollar Road,” Oscar-nominated director Raoul Peck spent years building on ProPublica’s coverage of how Black families are dispossessed of their land. “These were people I knew, these were situations that I knew.”
A ProPublica-New York Times Magazine story exposed a system with few legal protections for families. A first-of-its-kind bill aims to provide parents with free counsel when child protection workers try to move their kids without going to court.
As abortion access dwindles, America’s “parental-involvement” laws place further restrictions on teenagers — who may need to ask judges for permission to end their pregnancies.
Child advocates are suing New York for a program they say would create an unlawful shadow foster system that deprives families of their rights, saying a ProPublica investigation made the dangers “abundantly clear.”
Days after ProPublica featured Molly Cordell in a story about how a North Carolina county illegally tore her from her family and made her homeless, she got a $4 million settlement.
Across the country, unregulated “shadow” foster care is severing parents from children — who often wind up abandoned by the system that’s supposed to protect them.
Jackie Thomas was $29,134 in debt and in trouble with state regulators. She hadn’t slept in days. If a judge ruled against her, she’d fail the mothers who could only keep their jobs thanks to the 24-hour child care she offered.
Informed by a ProPublica article investigating why Black Americans were three times more likely to undergo diabetic amputations, five members of congress are working to fund screening and enhance diagnostics in an effort to save limbs.
A year after a ProPublica story highlighted problems for landowners who passed down “heirs’ property” without wills, a reformer won a MacArthur “genius” award and a nonprofit organization has received a flood of donations.
The American Diabetes Association is creating an initiative to fight unnecessary amputations, which a ProPublica investigation found disproportionately affect Black diabetics. Congress, doctors and the public are finally taking notice, too.
Black patients were losing limbs at triple the rate of others. The doctor put up billboards in the Mississippi Delta. Amputation Prevention Institute, they read. He could save their limbs, if it wasn’t too late.
Low on essential supplies and fearing they’ll get sick, doctors and nurses told ProPublica in-person care for coronavirus patients has been scaled back. In some cases, it’s causing serious harm.
“Caí por primera vez en la cuenta de lo diferente que es cuando vi deteriorarse a mi primer paciente de coronavirus. Pensé ‘Maldita sea, esto no es una gripa’, mientras veía a este hombre relativamente joven que se esforzaba por respirar y expulsaba secreciones espumosas de color rosa por su tubo”.
“It first struck me how different it was when I saw my first coronavirus patient go bad. I was like, Holy shit, this is not the flu. Watching this relatively young guy, gasping for air, pink frothy secretions coming out of his tube.”
Welcome to Coffeyville, Kansas, where the judge has no law degree, debt collectors get a cut of the bail and Americans are watching their lives — and liberty — disappear in the pursuit of medical debt collection.
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