His articles about the second Iraq war and Plame affair matters have appeared in National Journal, where he has worked as a staff correspondent and contributing editor, The Atlantic, and, earlier The American Prospect.

[6] One story disclosed that the nation's then largest health insurer, WellPoint, using a computer algorithm, identified women recently diagnosed with breast cancer and then singled them out for cancellation of their policies, without a legitimate cause to do so.

[7] The story not only caused considerable and immediate public outrage, but led Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, and President Barack Obama, to call on WellPoint to end the practice.

[11][12][13] He won the Barlett & Steele Award for Business Investigative Reporting from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication of Arizona State University as well as other honors for the stories.

The current masthead of the Voice lists Waas as a "Contributors Emeritus" to the newspaper, along with such other notable writers, critics, investigative reporters, and cartoonists who worked for the paper during the same era, as Wayne Barrett, Jack Newfield, Teresa Carpenter, Ron Rosenbaum, the late Norman Mailer, Mim Udovitch, Matt Groening and Mark Alan Stamaty.

"[29] In an article about the sanctions, published in 2003, Foreign Policy magazine concluded that the U.S.-imposed trade embargo "proved devastating to the Ugandan economy" and that "they helped set in motion the events that led to the fall of the regime.

[5] As part of his work for the Alicia Patterson Foundation, Waas published a 7,912 word article in the Los Angeles Times on April 3, 1994, detailing how mentally retarded children institutionalized by the District of Columbia government had died because of abuse and neglect.

[38][39][40][41][42] In a broader context, Waas' and Frantz's stories, ABC News Nightline anchor Ted Koppel said, made it "increasingly clear...that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes.. initiated and supported the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy.

Lewis cited disclosures by Waas, Frantz, and Hersh, to show that this had been in large part due to the U.S. sharing secret intelligence with Iraq, and encouraging allies such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan to transfer arms of U.S. origin to Saddam.

"[49][50] While writing numerous stories about the second Bush administration's policies that led up to war with Iraq, Waas simultaneously wrote about the investigation of CIA leak prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation as to who leaked covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to the press—illustrating in his reporting how the two stories were inextricably linked in that the effort to damage Plame was part of a broader Bush White House effort to discredit those who were alleging that it had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war.

Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz wrote on April 17, 2006, that Waas' account "set in motion the waiver springing Miller from jail on contempt charges.

State records obtained by Waas showed that a senior Department of Public Health lawyer warned in a confidential memo to her superiors that the Romney administration's failure to provide birth certificates to these children would constitute "'violations of existing statutes,' impair law enforcement and security efforts in a post 9/11 world, and would cause the children to encounter difficulties later in life as they tried to register for school, obtain a driver's license or a passport, enlist in the military, or even vote.

"[60] Romney, who had once vowed to be even more outspoken than Ted Kennedy in support of LGBT rights, while running for state office in Massachusetts—and often was—began to tell a very different story as he curried favor with conservative and evangelical voters.

"We have to keep in mind that is one person's record of what happened," Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel said on Fox News in one typical such comment repeated by Trump White House surrogates.

""[68] But in a June 7, 2017 report which appeared in Vox, Waas disclosed that Comey had contemporaneously spoke at length with three of his top aides about the president ordering him to shut down the FBI investigation of Flynn.

The Times story, however, went even further, disclosing that Trump ordered his then-White House Counsel, Don McGahn, to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey, even if there was no real evidence that either did anything wrong.

[84][85][86][87] While praising Waas, Rosen has severely criticized Woodward for allegedly having been co-opted by the Bush White House into believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when it in fact had none, thus propagating administration lies to take the nation to war.

"[84] Regarding those same stories, The Washington Post online White House columnist Dan Froomkin, wrote on March 31, 2006, wrote that Waas' articles presented a "compelling narrative about how President Bush and his top aides contrived their bogus case for war in Iraq," and had successfully succeeded in having the public believe it, by having "selectively leaked or declassified secret intelligence findings that served their political agenda -- while aggressively asserting the need to keep secret the information" that would contradict their misleading claims, and by silencing dissenters.

[49][88] On October 27, 1992, the late David Shaw, then a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism the previous year, assessed the reporting by his colleagues Murray Waas and Douglas Frantz on the first Bush administration's prewar policy towards Iraq leading up to the first Gulf War, noted that the reporters wrote more than 100 stores on the subject—about half appearing on the newspaper's front page—based on thousands of pages of highly classified government papers.

More broadly, Lasica further opined further that "Salon's coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky matter— was perhaps the "first sustained foray into classic investigative journalism" by an Internet publication and "served as a counterweight" to the mainstream media's "wolfpack mindset."

pointing out that as a result of his reporting, "Kenneth Starr's key Whitewater witness David Hale has suffered a serious blow to his credibility, and the independent counsel himself has been forced to fend off conflict-of-interest questions from the Justice Department.

Waas explained to Kurtz that while many reporters were only pursuing stories "to get "television appearances or million-dollar book contracts, it is difficult for us to play our proper role... My theory is, avoid the limelight, do what's important and leave your mark.

"[54] In the summer of 2006, writing in Nieman Reports, Jim Boyd, former deputy editorial page editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune for twenty-four years, prepared an "exclusive list" of newspaper reporters whom he considered "courageous," including among them, Waas, Dan Froomkin and Dana Priest of The Washington Post, and Helen Thomas of the Associated Press: "I’m not talking about physical courage, which many good journalists display daily in Iraq and other dangerous places," Boyd wrote, "I’m talking mental toughness, willingness to risk.

On March 17, 2010, Chittum wrote that Waas had conducted an "eye-opening investigation" demonstrating that, Assurant a major health-insurance company, had systematically targeted patients with costly and life-threatening health issues on the flimsiest of pretexts so they would no longer have to pay for their expensive care.

[97] On April 22, 2010, Chittum again praised Reuters and Waas for publishing a story documenting how Wellpoint, the nation's largest health insure, had "systematically targeted customers with breast cancer" to find excuses to drop their coverage.

On March 17, 2010, only days before the historic vote in the United States House of Representatives enacting the Affordable Care Act (commonly known as the ACA or "Obamacare") into law, Reuters published a story, based on a months long investigation by Waas, detailing how one of the nation's largest insurance companies, Assurant, had a policy of targeting all of it policyholders recently diagnosed with HIV for cancelation.

[7] The Reuters story asserted that WellPoint had employed a computer algorithm that specifically targeted all of their policyholders recently diagnosed with breast cancer, to search for any pretext whatsoever, to cancel their insurance, when they needed it the most.

[7] An earlier investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee had determined that just three health insurers—WellPoint (now Anthem), Assurant, and UnitedHealth Group—had made at least $300 million by improperly rescinding more than 19,000 policyholders with life-threatening, but costly illnesses, over one five-year period alone.

"[7] A Wellpoint executive testified before the committee that the company only engaged in rescission, a practice also known as post claims underwriting, as a means of "stopping fraud and material misrepresentation that contributes to spiraling health care costs."

"[105] Waas later won the Barlett & Steele Award for Business Investigative Reporting from the Walter Cronkite School at Arizona State University for his stories on WellPoint and other health insurance companies.