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Marshall Allen, a former ProPublica investigative reporter who relentlessly took on the U.S. health care system and fought for the rights of patients facing unfair medical bills, died Sunday at a hospital in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He was 52.
The cause was a heart attack, said Sonja Allen, his wife of 29 years.
Guided by his Christian faith, Allen approached his stories with the moral conviction that doctors, hospitals, drugmakers and health insurers could be less wasteful and more transparent and humane. His stories showed that drug companies purposely made eyedrops too big and set unnecessarily short expiration dates for drugs that were still effective and safe, leading to waste and driving up costs.
With other reporters, he analyzed millions of Medicare records to create “Surgeon Scorecard,” a ProPublica database that allowed patients to see for the first time the death and complication rates of surgeons performing common procedures like knee replacements and gallbladder removals. In another story, he showed how a hospital system refused to cover the care of an employee’s premature baby, leaving her with a bill for $898,984.57. Within days of Allen calling the system’s media representative, it promised to cover the bill.
“He would be our tour guide to things that were incredibly enraging,” said Tracy Weber, a ProPublica managing editor who worked with Allen. “He would walk us through it, and then he'd show us how it didn’t have to be that way.”
Allen’s journalism won numerous honors. A series of stories he did on patient safety in Las Vegas hospitals while at the Las Vegas Sun won the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. He was one of the first people at ProPublica to volunteer to cover the COVID-19 pandemic and was a member of the team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer in public service in 2021. That year, Allen also published a book, “Never Pay the First Bill: And Other Ways to Fight the Health Care System and Win,” which showed consumers how to advocate for themselves.
More than the honors, his stories exposing medical scams, waste in the health care system and hidden incentives in the insurance industry steadily achieved impact and motivated people in power to make changes.
“Marshall had this curiosity about the health care system that allowed him to explore stories with a freshness that many veteran health care reporters can’t do,” said Charles Ornstein, a ProPublica managing editor and longtime health journalist.
That curiosity led him to receive an award as one of America’s “Top Doctors,” despite having no medical credentials. Rather than ignoring a voice message from a telemarketer, calling about his “Top Doctor” award, Allen decided to inquire, exposing the absurdity of the accolades in the process.
After he explained that he was actually a journalist, not a doctor, he asked if he could still receive the award. Indeed, he could — for a “reduced rate” of $289.
Allen came to journalism through his work as a Christian missionary. After graduating from the University of Colorado Boulder with an English degree, he spent five years as an evangelical minister, including three in Kenya, and earned a master’s degree in theology at Fuller Theological Seminary in California.
While he and his wife were in Kenya, he started writing newsletters and reports to his family about their experiences, Sonja Allen said. “He just came to life when he started to write,” she said. “I would say the No. 1 thing that motivated his work was his belief in the Bible, of standing up for what's right.”
But not all editors saw it that way. In an interview for one of his first journalism jobs, a hard-nosed editor questioned Allen about how his faith background would prepare him for reporting.
“I explained what I saw as a natural progression from the ministry to muckraking, pointing out that both are valid ways of serving a higher cause,” Allen wrote in a 2018 essay that was copublished in The New York Times. “The Bible endorses telling the truth, without bias. So does journalism. The Bible commands honesty and integrity. In journalism, your reputation is your main calling card with sources and readers.”
After a few years working for community newspapers in Southern California, he joined the Las Vegas Sun. There, his editor asked him to cover health care.
“Marshall’s exact words were, ‘I couldn’t imagine anything more boring than health care,’” Sonja Allen said.
But he soon discovered an endlessly intriguing and infuriating beat, challenging what many people accepted as just the way it is. The opening to the series that won the Goldsmith began, “There’s a running joke about hospitals here: ‘Where do you go for great health care in Las Vegas?’ ‘The airport.’ The implication is everyone knows hospital care in Southern Nevada is substandard.”
Allen and his colleague showed that health care insiders had access to information that the public didn’t. Analyzing records on preventable infections and injuries, they provided consumers with quality-of-care data that allowed them to make better decisions and led to new state laws.
In 2011, Allen was hired by ProPublica, where he began to dig into surgical complications.
“Everybody told Marshall that this was impossible, that you could never do this, that you could never do this right, that you should leave this to the pros,” Ornstein said. “And, of course, Marshall was completely undaunted by this challenge.”
Marshall Allen reporting from a hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, in 2014 (Daymon Hartley for ProPublica)Farley Chase, Allen’s literary agent, described him in almost identical terms: “He was insulted by the inscrutability of the health care system but had this kind of like just roll-up-your-sleeves, undaunted-by-any-kind-of-challenge attitude.”
In addition to his steadfastness, Allen was known in the newsroom for his generosity, especially as a mentor to younger reporters.
Caroline Chen, who covers health care, said that when she moved across the country to New York, Allen immediately invited her and her husband over for dinner.
“He was just generous in every way, like talking over stories,” she said. “He sent me sources. I’d send him sources. We would sometimes take a peek at each other’s drafts.”
When COVID-19 hit, Allen, Chen and others raced to pursue stories in a stressful environment. But no matter how late it was, Chen said, he kept his cool as a team player with no ego.
Allen’s passion for mentoring others extended into teaching at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. In 2020, he edited a project for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, showing how New Jersey police unions had cut deals to shield cops from accountability while increasing their benefits.
In 2021, Allen decided to leave journalism to tackle the problems he saw in the health care system directly by working for the Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. There, he led work tracking pandemic relief funds and helped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention improve the process for nursing homes to report COVID-19 data, the agency said.
But Allen never gave up his passion for writing — or for helping patients. Following the success of his book, he started a Substack newsletter where he continued to expose abuses in the health care system and give consumers advice about how to fight medical bills. He created a company called Allen Health Academy to turn his book into video tutorials and regularly spoke at conferences for health insurance brokers and benefits advisers, where he would offer to lend a hand.
“Hundreds and hundreds of people called him, and he helped them navigate their bills,” Sonja Allen said. He never charged anyone and used any money he received from his newsletter to hire patient advocates for people who needed additional help, she said.
To extend his reach further, Allen had recently created an AI clone of himself, she said, training it on all his articles, his book and podcasts and teaching it to mimic his own voice, so that more people could tap into his knowledge.
At home, Allen was deeply involved in his church, teaching Sunday school and leading a group of men, encouraging them to be good husbands and fathers, his wife said. He was a coffee connoisseur and roasted his own beans. “You could smell it when you drove up because the whole neighborhood smelled like coffee,” she said.
But more than anything, Sonja Allen said, he dreamed of being a good father to his three sons, Isaac, Ashton and Cody. He came up with quizzes to ensure they paid attention in church and invented games that made him famous for his neighborhood birthday parties.
In one, played outside at night, his sons’ friends had to sneak through the dark and place a penny in a plastic bin hidden in the woods. But if Allen shined his flashlight on them, they were out.
“He could totally see the kids, but he would, you know, kind of pretend that he couldn’t see them,” his wife said. “They were crawling on the ground and hiding behind trees and, you know, giggling, and then he would kind of pass by them like he didn’t see them. And then he would turn around and catch people every so often with his flashlight.”
Allen went into cardiac arrest on Thursday and was rushed to Baylor Scott & White Medical Center-Grapevine, where he died Sunday surrounded by friends and family. Dr. Marty Makary, a friend and professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who hired Allen to edit two of his books, said he visited him in the hospital.
“In the final hours, this is what I told him,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Marshall, we watched you fight tirelessly for the voiceless and become a fierce advocate for the defenseless — a fight many will continue.”
Friends have created a GoFundMe page to help support the family.
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We are pleased to announce the 10 journalists chosen as the 2024 cohort of the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program.
The ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program was established in 2023 to expand the ranks of editors with investigative experience in newsrooms across the country, with a focus on journalists from underrepresented backgrounds.
This program is funded by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, which supports journalism, film and arts organizations whose work is dedicated to social justice and strengthening democracy.
Participants will undergo a five-day intensive editing boot camp in New York, with courses and panel discussions led by ProPublica’s senior editors. After the boot camp, participants will gather virtually every two months for continuing development seminars and be assigned a ProPublica senior editor as a mentor for advice on their work and careers.
This year, 115 people applied for the program.
“ProPublica is proud to continue this unique program, which aims to help diversify the industry by providing investigative editing training to journalists from underrepresented backgrounds,” said Stephen Engelberg, editor-in-chief of ProPublica.
We’re thrilled to introduce the 2024 cohort of the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program:
Rebekah Allen is the politics editor of The Texas Tribune, an award-winning nonprofit newsroom that focuses on policy and politics. She oversees a team based in Austin and Washington, D.C., that reports on government accountability and political influence. Previously, Rebekah was a state government reporter at The Dallas Morning News. Before that, she worked as an investigative reporter at The Advocate/Times Picayune in South Louisiana, where she was named Louisiana Reporter of the Year in 2018 by the Louisiana-Mississippi Associated Press and Media Editors Contest. She was in the inaugural cohort of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.
Liz Brazile is the deputy online managing editor at KUOW Public Radio in Seattle, where she helps oversee the newsroom’s daily web coverage and digital news strategy and edits stories across various beats. Liz joined KUOW in January 2020 as an online editor/producer, splitting her time between reporting and editing. Prior to that, Liz covered education for Crosscut/KCTS 9. She is also an alumna of YES! Magazine, WLWT-TV and The Cincinnati Herald. Liz is senior vice president on the board of the Seattle Association of Black Journalists.
Ana Campoy is an editor in The Washington Post’s climate team, where she oversees the Climate Solutions vertical and other climate reporters who focus on innovative storytelling. She started her journalism career at her hometown newspaper in Monterrey, Mexico, before covering the oil industry and national news for The Wall Street Journal. Her reporting portfolio ranged from complex data projects to quirky features on such topics as suburban feral pigs. Before arriving at the Post, Ana was an editor at Quartz, where she led a team of international reporters covering the inner workings of the global economy.
Leah Donnella is a senior editor on NPR’s award-winning Code Switch team, which reports on race, identity, politics and culture. In her role, Leah edits the Code Switch podcast and writes the weekly newsletter, which analyzes how race intersects with the biggest news stories around the country. She has worked on the Code Switch team since 2015, reporting on everything from Donald Trump’s entrance into presidential politics to the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder to how Jewish American identity has been reshaped since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7. Before coming to NPR, Leah worked at WHYY in Philadelphia, where she supported the Public Media Commons, which trains young people who are interested in becoming journalists.
Subrina Hudson is the business editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, where she manages a team under the newly created Money desk that helps readers understand how business impacts their daily lives. Previously, she was the business editor at the Las Vegas Review-Journal after serving as the assistant business editor. She joined the Review-Journal as a retail reporter and expanded her coverage to include real estate and unemployment. She has also been a reporter at the Orange County Business Journal, The Real Deal and the Los Angeles Business Journal. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s in journalism from Boston University.
Clarissa A. León serves as the deputy editor for Documented, New York's go-to source for immigration news. At Documented, she works on advancing newsroom operations and community engagement reporting. Previously, she held numerous positions as an editor, researcher, reporter and educator. Originally from Reno, Nevada, she is now based in New Jersey.
Asraa Mustufa is managing editor at The Examination, an investigative news outlet focused on global health. She was previously an editor at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, where she worked on the award-winning Pandora Papers investigation and other global reporting collaborations. She’s also served as an editor, digital producer and social media specialist helping shape and promote investigative reporting and news products in Chicago on a range of topics including COVID-19 data, police misconduct, public school funding and local elections.
Soo Oh is an investigative editor at The Markup. Before joining The Markup, she was the data editor at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. She has reported stories, analyzed data, coded interactive visuals, and built internal tools at the Center for Investigative Reporting, The Wall Street Journal, Vox, the Los Angeles Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2018, she was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University, where she researched how to better manage and support journalists with technical skills.
Maye Primera is the editorial director at El Tímpano, a civic media organization serving and covering the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrants. She has worked as a reporter and editor for more than 20 years, covering politics, immigration, borders, human rights, and violence in Latin America and the U.S. Her enterprise multimedia work has received a national News and Documentary Emmy Award, the Hillman Prize, the RFK Human Rights Award, two Edward R. Murrow Awards, two King of Spain Awards, and the Ortega and Gasset prize. Primera is an alumna of the executive program in news innovation and leadership at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
Naveena Sadasivam is an investigative journalist at Grist covering the oil and gas industry and climate change. She previously worked at the Texas Observer, Inside Climate News and ProPublica and has won accolades from the Society of Environmental Journalists, Society of Professional Journalists and Online News Association, among others. She is based in Oakland, California.
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