Elisabeth Rosenthal
Physician and health journalist
Elisabeth Rosenthal is a physician turned journalist who spent over two decades at the New York Times. She wrote An American Sickness, about the high cost of US healthcare.
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American Born 1956 in New York City, United States
About Elisabeth Rosenthal
Elisabeth Rosenthal trained as a doctor and holds a medical degree from Harvard Medical School. She also studied biology at Stanford University and English literature at Cambridge University. She spent more than twenty years at the New York Times, beginning in the science department and later covering health and hospitals. She also worked from Beijing and Rome, and reported on environmental issues before returning to health writing. Her two-year series "Paying Till it Hurts" won many prizes. In 2016 she was appointed editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News, a non-profit newsroom focused on health and health policy. An American Sickness was her first book. She wrote it out of a wish to help readers make sense of steep US medical costs and push back against them. The book argues that distorted financial incentives sit at the root of the country's healthcare problems.