Joseph Burns

An independent journalist, Joseph Burns is the health insurance topic leader for the Association of Health Care Journalists and contributes to AHCJ’s Covering Health blog. He has also written about health policy and the business of health care for a wide variety of publications, including Healthcare Finance News, Hospitals & Health Networks, Managed Care magazine, Ophthalmology Management, TaxACT.com, and The Dark Report. As a writer and editor, he has covered health care since 1991 for a variety of organizations, including Athena Forum, the Center for Health Value Information, The Commonwealth Fund, the Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute, the National Business Coalition on Health, the National Committee for Quality Assurance, National Quality Forum, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. One of the founding editors of the Practice Options newsletters (published by Premier Healthcare Resource), Burns also has edited books on health care business strategies for Faulkner & Gray and Panel Publishers, both in New York. From 1991 to 1994, he was editor-in-chief of Business & Health magazine, formerly published by Medical Economics Co., and later was a contributing editor and author of a monthly column for Managed Healthcare Executive magazine. He was the founding editor of The Financial Manager, a magazine for accountants and other business strategists. Burns began his career as a newspaper reporter in Connecticut and later worked as a regional news editor for The Hartford Courant, the nation’s oldest newspaper. While at The Courant, he taught news writing in the Journalism Department at the University of Connecticut. He lives in Falmouth, Mass., with his wife, Robin, and their Labrador retriever, Roscoe.