Public Health Watch reporters often obtain government and other public documents as part of their investigations. We are making many of those records available to readers in searchable form.
The links below allow you to view documents from selected projects using Google’s Pinpoint. Click on any featured term to search all of the records, or enter your own terms.
Let us know what you find, at tips@publichealthwatch.org.
Medicaid Expansion: The Holdouts
The Holdouts is a reporting project that shows the impacts of states’ refusal to expand Medicaid coverage. Since 2010, when the Affordable Care Act became law, 39 states have adopted expansion through legislation or ballot initiatives. Eleven states have not, leaving millions of Americans — many of them the working poor — uninsured and without access to care.
The Holdouts documents collection is an evolving compilation of research about the non-expansion states. Records include overviews of each state’s Medicaid program and data on the potential coverage and economic effects of Medicaid expansion. The goal is to make clear what’s at stake and find new ways to tell this important story.
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Read stories from The Holdouts project.
Toxic Texas Air
Harris County, Texas, is the epicenter of America’s petrochemical industry. Documents from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Harris County Pollution Control Services and the Texas Attorney General’s Office from 2015 to 2022 show how county officials try to hold polluters accountable — even as the state works to impede them.
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The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality issued just over 1,300 penalties for air-pollution violations between September 2015 and June 2022. Although the petrochemical industry has thousands of illegal releases each year, the TCEQ handed out only 462 fines for these “emissions events.”
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Read the story.