Dan Bauman
Dan Bauman follows how financial decisions in health care and other institutions translate into consequences for workers, patients, and local businesses, reporting for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on stories where insurance, labor, and public health collide. His recent work centers on health insurers such as Centene, hospital–insurer contract disputes, and job cuts by major employers, and draws on years of investigative reporting into higher education finance and governance.
Health insurance and corporate restructuring
Bauman’s coverage of Centene zeroes in on the financial pressures driving restructuring at one of the country’s largest Medicaid and Affordable Care Act plan managers. In reporting on Centene’s voluntary employee buyouts, he lays out how a steep decline in health insurance membership and billions of dollars in losses have pushed the Clayton-based company to shrink its workforce, quantifying the drop in ACA membership and overall enrollment from securities filings and company disclosures. He notes that cuts in government funding for Medicaid and ACA-plan subsidies helped drive a roughly two‑million person reduction in Centene’s ACA plan membership between early 2025 and early 2026, a decline of more than a third, and a six percent fall in overall membership across its plans.
His story situates the buyouts against the backdrop of a $6.7 billion loss following a prior year’s $3 billion profit and an earlier plan to lay off about 2,000 workers, framing the voluntary separation program as part of an evolving cost‑cutting strategy rather than a standalone move.
Beyond Centene, Bauman reports on health system–insurer contract negotiations, such as the still‑pending agreement between BJC and Anthem ahead of an anticipated spike in health‑care costs. In that coverage he treats the deal not as a technical footnote but as a hinge for what patients, employers, and local institutions will pay, highlighting how unresolved contracts can expose consumers to higher bills or uncertainty about network access. Across these pieces, his distinguishing trait is the way he threads regulatory changes, membership data, and corporate earnings into plain-language explanations of why specific health insurance decisions matter to people who rely on those plans.
Local labor and economic fallout
Bauman’s business reporting repeatedly tracks how corporate and logistical decisions show up as job losses in the region. In a story on a Danish logistics company shedding 84 jobs at a riverfront warehouse in north St. Louis, he uses state-issued notices to establish both the scale and timing of the layoffs, tying a seemingly remote corporate decision to the specific number of workers affected at a single facility. His Centene coverage likewise treats workforce reductions as a core part of the narrative, distinguishing between voluntary buyouts and prior layoff plans and pressing for clarity on whether current measures are part of a broader restructuring.
Taken together, these pieces show a reporter who treats employment impacts as central to finance coverage, consistently quantifying job cuts and foregrounding the workers and communities at the end of those corporate decisions.
Public health events with business implications
Recent work also places Bauman at the junction of public health and local commerce. In coverage of measles cases linked to an Amtrak train that traveled through the St. Louis area, he reports how county health officials connected a third infection to the train and details exposure locations, including a Salt + Smoke restaurant where patrons were advised to monitor for symptoms. A companion piece on possible measles exposures at Busch Stadium and other area businesses expands that lens, cataloging multiple venues identified by state officials and underscoring how a single chain of transmission can affect high-profile entertainment and retail spaces. These stories sit in the local business section but are written with the precision of health reporting, showing his inclination to treat disease outbreaks as operational and financial events for affected venues as well as medical concerns for the public.
Higher education finance and governance
Before his current focus on local business and health-care finance, Bauman built a deep record covering the business of higher education and how it affects faculty, staff, students, and surrounding communities. As a senior reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education, he investigated institutional finance, labor, and governance, producing enterprise and investigative work that relied on open-records requests and data analysis. His Chronicle profile highlights projects that exposed an online huckster posing as a financial guru in the news, chronicled a financially devastated university that alerted creditors to potential closure while continuing to enroll students, and scrutinized millions of dollars in state-level campaign donations that helped partisans and ideologues win seats on boards overseeing major public universities. Earlier in his tenure there, he led the publication of semiannual chief executive compensation projects and wrote data-driven articles on executive pay, building tools and databases to support his reporting and that of colleagues.
That background in tracing money through complex institutions, and in showing who benefits or suffers from those flows, is mirrored in his current work on health insurers, hospital contracts, and local layoffs.
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Aimee Picchi
Aimee Picchi connects Social Security, retirement programs and economic policy directly to the financial security of ordinary Americans, showing how macro decisions hit household budgets. She is associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch at CBS News, covering business and personal finance with clear, accessible explanations of complex money issues. Her core beat is Social Security and retirement, interest rates and inflation, and how policy, markets and company strategies affect workers, retirees, savers and investors. She reports on benefit adequacy, looming Social Security cuts, COLA changes, Federal Reserve rate decisions, fuel costs, trade tensions and labor’s share of income, always framing coverage around pocketbook impacts. Her background includes retirement reporting fellowships, prior staff reporting on technology, media and business, an Institutional Investor book on affluent investors, and freelance work for national outlets. She also writes science fiction and fantasy and is a Nebula Award finalist.
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