The president of the Association of Health Care Journalists gave high marks to coverage of the health care debate that just ended with passage of President Barack Obama's health care initiative.

But Charles Ornstein, who is also a senior reporter at ProPublica.org, said the political aspects of the story might have gotten more play than they should have because of the time needed to focus on the nuts and bolts of the legislation.

“Unfortunately, when you are dealing with legislation, you get the horse race coverage,” said Ornstein, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who joined ProPublica in 2008. “You saw a lot of that here, particularly after November and the Scott Brown election.”

Still, Ornstein added, “there are stories out there that were really, really good.”

He cited a Los Angeles Times piece that ran in February and focused on a 20-year-old New York state policy that required many insurance companies to provide health care coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions, but did not require residents to buy coverage: “It looked at how that was a recipe for failure and higher premiums because you did not require it to be purchased. It showed a real health policy impact.”

He noted similar in-depth pieces that ran in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The New York Times.

“Stories looked at various components of the bill, showed how it would affect different groups,” Ornstein added. “That is really valuable.”

He also said the time limits on television made it difficult to focus on policy over politics, which is easier to frame and sometimes gets more viewers.

“TV, because of the short window to explain things did not have enough opportunity to get into some of this,” he said. “PBS and the News Hour had more time to get into it.”

Because not every newspaper story was seen everyday, many readers felt as if they were not getting the coverage, he explained. “I would see that folks would say 'why didn't you do a story on the impact on the uninsured in Tennessee?' But then you would see The Tennessean had it three days ago, but you did not see it.”

He also said the political aspects often got front-page play while the policy elements were stuck inside in many cases: “Sometimes you have to look inside the paper to see the policy stories. It could be people just weren't looking at the stories. But they were being written everyday.”

There is also the matter of newspaper stories on the Web, which aren't always read the same way that they are in print. Readers do more scanning of a print paper and more direct links to stories on the Web, allowing for less viewing of the entire paper's content.