Women Entrepreneurship Week 2019

Jeanne Pinder

Founder/CEO | ClearHealthCosts

Jeanne Pinder
Jeanne Pinder is challenging the U.S. health care system to be honest and transparent about what things cost. She has built a trailblazing digital startup, ClearHealthCosts, to reveal the secrets of health pricing.

As founder and CEO of ClearHealthCosts, she has led deep reporting on this topic on the home site and 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.

Her TED talk has gone viral, with more than 1.4 million views.

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.

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. The company has won many non-journalism awards, including the Patient Shark Tank award at the New York City e-Health Collaborative, and the audience choice award at the Department of Health and Human Services Datapalooza. She was named a “health hero” by O, the Oprah magazine.

A lifelong journalist, she worked at The New York Times for more than 20 years, then volunteered for a buyout and won a shark-tank-type pitch contest before a jury of New York venture capitalists and internet luminaries to start the company.

Before The Times, she worked at The Des Moines (Ia.) Register and The Grinnell (Ia.) 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 U.S. healthcare marketplace.