How We Report and How We Build Our Lists

This page exists so you can check our work.

Where our numbers come from

We use primary sources only:

• NY State of Health — plan availability, income thresholds, enrollment dates
• New York State Department of Health — program rules, hospital financial assistance law, licensing
• NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene — city programs, clinic locations, health alerts
• NYC Health + Hospitals and NYC Care — public system access
• CMS and Medicare.gov — federal program rules, hospital price transparency files
• New York State Department of Financial Services — insurance and billing regulation
• The text of the statute itself when a legal right is involved

Secondary coverage — news reports, advocacy summaries, other publications — can point us to a story, but it does not become a number on this site until we’ve confirmed it at the source.

Every figure carries the date we checked it. Income limits, deadlines, and program rules change, sometimes with little notice. A number without a date is not useful, so we don’t publish them that way.

How we build lists of practices and clinics

Our lists — “primary care in Washington Heights that takes Medicaid,” “urgent care in Manhattan if you have no insurance” — follow the same procedure every time.

What we check for every entry:

1. Active New York license for the practice’s clinicians, through the NYS Office of the Professions or the NPI registry.
2. Location and contact details, confirmed against the practice’s own current listing.
3. Which plans they say they accept, taken from the practice’s own published information or a direct call. We record the date. Insurance participation changes constantly, and no third-party directory is reliable on this point — including ours, once time has passed. Always confirm before you go.
4. Languages spoken, where the practice states them.
5. Practical access details where relevant: walk-in availability, hours, whether there’s a sliding scale.

What we do not do:

• We do not rank practices by quality. We are not in a position to judge clinical care, and neither is any website that claims to.
• We do not aggregate or republish patient reviews.
• We do not include a practice because someone asked us to, and we do not exclude one because someone asked us to.
• We do not accept payment, advertising, affiliate commissions, or anything else of value in exchange for inclusion, position, or a link. This is not a promise about our intentions; it’s a description of how the site is funded, which is not by practices.

How lists are ordered: by neighborhood and then alphabetically, or by whichever practical criterion the article states at the top. Position is not a verdict.

How often we recheck: every list carries a “last verified” date. We recheck lists at least every six months, and immediately when a reader tells us something has changed.

Corrections

If a detail on this site is wrong — a phone number, an accepted plan, an income threshold, a deadline — write to editor@nycmednews.com. We fix errors of fact as soon as we can confirm the correction, and we note the change on the page.

A note on AI

We use AI tools in production — for structuring drafts, for summarizing source documents, for checking our own writing. Every fact published here is verified by a person against a primary source before it goes live, and the editorial judgment is a person’s. We say this plainly because readers deserve to know how anything they read was made.