biography

Sarah Kliff is one of the country's leading health policy journalists, who has spent nearly a decade chronicling Washington's battle over the Affordable Care Act. Her reporting has inspired new legislation in Congress, been cited by the Supreme Court, and resulted in multiple hospitals revising their billing policies.

Sarah is an investigative reporter at the New York Times, focused on health care. She is currently investigating the high costs of coronavirus testing and treatment, and encourages patients to share any bills they’ve received here.

Before joining the Times, Sarah was a senior policy correspondent at Vox.com,. Her last project there focused on the high cost of emergency room care, and relied on a crowdsourced database of more than 2,000 patient bills that her readers submitted to Vox.

That series resulted in more than $100,000 in medical debt being reversed, hospitals implementing new billing policies, and new legislative proposals in Congress and the California legislature.

At Vox, she was also the creator and host of the Impact, an award-winning podcast about how policy effects people.

Prior to joining Vox, Sarah covered health policy for the Washington Post, where she was a founding writer at Wonkblog, a blog dedicated to making complicated policy easily understandable. She has also covered health policy for Politico and Newsweek magazine. 

Sarah's work has impact: the Supreme Court cited Sarah's work in their 2012 decision upholding the health care law. After she broke news in early 2017 that Republican legislators had exempted their own coverage from their Obamacare repeal bill, the House of Representatives took a vote to close that loophole. 

She is the recipient of multiple reporting awards, including fellowships from the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California.

Sarah is a frequent television guest and has appeared on CBS, PBS, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. She enjoys public speaking and, most recently, has presented at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Colorado Health Institute and the California Health Care Foundation.

Sarah grew up in Seattle and Toronto. She is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, where she got her start in journalism working on the campus paper. She resides in Washington, D.C. with her husband, son, and a very friendly dog named Goose.