John Ingold

John Ingold is a co-founder of The Colorado Sun and a health reporter who treats Colorado’s health care system as an interconnected mix of policy, money, science and everyday experience. His coverage stands out for explaining complex state programs and medical advances in plain language, showing how decisions about insurance, prescription drugs and public health shape life for patients and communities. He is recognized within the newsroom as a subject specialist on health care and is frequently tapped to moderate expert discussions on health policy.

Health policy, insurance and the cost of care

Much of Ingold’s work tracks how Colorado’s health insurance markets and state policy tools affect what people pay for care and what coverage they receive. In a recent story on mounting premium increases, he walked readers through why insurers on the individual market were asking for steep rate hikes and which regions faced the largest jumps, then connected those numbers to the programs state officials created to contain costs, including reinsurance, a prescription drug affordability board and the Colorado Option. He regularly returns to the Colorado Option and similar initiatives, explaining how they are supposed to engineer plans with richer benefits and lower prices and what obstacles they encounter in practice.

Ingold’s reporting is often built around state-level levers and their real-world impact: how reinsurance spreads the risk of expensive claims, how boards can limit what insurers and consumers pay for prescription drugs, and how federal regulators respond to Colorado’s efforts to reshape its markets. When Colorado won federal approval to import prescription drugs from Canada, he focused on the “now comes the hard part” stage, examining the logistical and political challenges that stand between approval on paper and cheaper medications at the pharmacy counter. He also provides service-oriented coverage of health insurance choices, hosting discussions on open enrollment with panels of experts to help residents understand their options and the trade-offs among different plans. Across this work, he writes with a calm, explanatory tone that matches The Colorado Sun’s pledge to deliver news at a “calm heart rate,” even when the subject is what he has described as an approaching “insurance Armageddon.”

Prescription drugs, genetics and medical innovation

Ingold frequently reports at the intersection of pharmaceuticals, genetics and cutting-edge research, translating technical work into accessible stories about risk and opportunity in modern medicine. In a piece on UCHealth’s biobank, a partnership with the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, he examined how storing information from hundreds of thousands of patients can reveal when genes and drugs do not mix, potentially preventing dangerous reactions and guiding more personalized treatment. He framed the biobank not as abstract infrastructure but as a tool that might change decisions at the bedside, highlighting how clinicians can use gene–drug interaction data to choose safer or more effective therapies.

His coverage of experimental approaches to weight loss similarly bridges laboratory science and everyday health concerns. Reporting on research into python metabolisms, he explained how studying the way these animals rapidly transform their bodies after feeding could point toward new classes of weight loss drugs. Rather than focusing only on the novelty of pythons, he placed the study in the context of intense interest in obesity treatments and the broader pharmaceutical push to develop next-generation medications. Ingold’s recurring attention to prescription drug policy and innovation—whether through importation schemes, affordability boards or basic research—gives his beat a strong through-line around how medicines are developed, priced and delivered.

Public health threats, environment and infectious disease

Ingold extends his health coverage beyond hospitals and clinics to public health threats that arise from the environment, climate and infectious disease. In his mosquito coverage, including a story on Colorado’s unusually quiet West Nile season, he treated mosquitoes as both nuisance and vector, explaining how weather patterns and surveillance data translate into risks for communities and why some years bring more infections than others. He uses these stories to explore how public health agencies track and respond to threats, and how residents can interpret seasonal warnings about their “least-favorite bloodsuckers.”

He has also reported on how residents perceive climate change as a current health threat, drawing on data from the Colorado Health Access Survey and interviews with experts to connect climate indicators to respiratory issues, heat-related illness and other health outcomes. Earlier coverage has followed COVID-era insurance trends, documenting how the rate of people in Colorado with health insurance held steady or shifted during the pandemic and what that meant for access to care. In another line of reporting, he has written about campaigns to address vaccine hesitancy in Alaska Native communities, focusing on how public health workers build informational efforts that can persuade more people to accept vaccines for diseases such as flu, RSV and COVID. Across these pieces, Ingold treats public health as a system of data, outreach and behavior rather than just a tally of case counts.

Explanations, expert panels and subject specialization

Ingold’s role as a health reporter extends into public-facing explanations and events, reinforcing his reputation as a subject specialist. He regularly appears in videos and live discussions to walk audiences through state health policies, such as a plan by Colorado leaders to make prescription drugs cheaper, where he discussed the mechanics and challenges on a regional podcast. At The Colorado Sun’s SunFest, he moderated a health-focused session alongside academic and policy experts, underscoring his function as a bridge between technical discourse and general readers. He leads newsroom events on topics like health insurance open enrollment, interviewing panels of specialists to clarify how policy changes translate into choices for individuals and families.

Within The Colorado Sun, Ingold is explicitly described as a reporter specializing in health care coverage, and that specialization is marked in his stories with subject labels that highlight his deep knowledge of the topic. His reporting combines narrative elements, data and policy detail, often returning to the same programs and initiatives over time to track whether they deliver on promises around affordability, access and outcomes. For communications teams, the through-line is consistent: he is most engaged by stories that illuminate how health systems work—financially, scientifically and politically—and that can be grounded in clear evidence, expert insight and implications for people navigating care in Colorado.