Jeanne Pinder

Founder and CEO, ClearHealthCosts

Pelham, NY

Lifelong journalist Jeanne Pinder is founder and CEO of ClearHealthCosts, a digital media startup that demands price transparency from the US healthcare system. After taking a buyout from The New York Times, where she worked for more than 20 years, she won a Shark Tank–style competition with her ClearHealthCosts pitch and hasn’t looked back.

Since its founding in 2011, the company has reported on and crowdsourced health price data in partnership with prestigious newsrooms in New Orleans, Philadelphia, Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere.

This work has won numerous journalism prizes – a national Edward R. Murrow award, a Society for Professional Journalists public service gold medal and a spot as a finalist for a Peabody Award, as well as numerous local and regional awards.

“What if all US health care costs were transparent?”

The company has won grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the International Women’s Media Foundation, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, J-Lab at American University, the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and others.

Her TED talk has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Pinder is a national expert on health costs and has been quoted in The New York Times, the CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and elsewhere.

Previously, in her native Iowa, she worked at The Des Moines Register and The Grinnell Herald-Register, a twice-weekly newspaper that her grandfather bought in 1944.

She speaks fluent but rusty Russian. In a previous lifetime, she lived in what was then the Soviet Union, a place almost as mysterious as the US healthcare marketplace.