Alison Kodjak
Alison Fitzgerald Kodjak is a health policy correspondent on NPR's Science Desk.
Her work focuses on the business and politics of health care and how those forces flow through to the general public. Her stories about drug prices, limits on insurance, and changes in Medicare and Medicaid appear on NPR's shows and in the Shots blog.
She joined NPR in September 2015 after a nearly two-decade career in print journalism, where she won several awards—including three George Polk Awards—as an economics, finance, and investigative reporter.
She spent two years at the Center for Public Integrity, leading projects in financial, telecom, and political reporting. Her first project at the Center, "After the Meltdown," was honored with the 2014 Polk Award for business reporting and the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi award.
Her work as both reporter and editor on the foreclosure crisis in Florida, on Warren Buffet's predatory mobile home businesses, and on the telecom industry were honored by several journalism organizations. She was part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists team that won the 2015 Polk Award for revealing offshore banking practices.
Prior to joining the Center, Fitzgerald Kodjak spent more than a decade at Bloomberg News, where she wrote about the convergence of politics, government, and economics. She interviewed chairs of the Federal Reserve and traveled the world with two U.S. Treasury secretaries.
And as part of Bloomberg's investigative team, she wrote about the bankruptcy of General Motors Corp. and the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill. She was part of a team at Bloomberg that successfully sued the Federal Reserve to release records of the 2008 bank bailouts, an effort that was honored with the 2009 George Polk Award. Her work on the international food price crisis in 2008 won her the Overseas Press Club's Malcolm Forbes Award.
Fitzgerald Kodjak and co-author Stanley Reed are authors of In Too Deep: BP and the Drilling Race that Took It Down, published in 2011 by John Wiley & Sons.
In January 2019, Fitzgerald Kodjak began her one-year term as the President of the National Press Club in Washington, DC.
She's a graduate of Georgetown University and Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
She raises children and chickens in suburban Maryland.
-
The legislation Senate Republicans are releasing is expected to track the House version that was passed last month. Negotiations have been going on in secret.
-
The vaccine against Zika vaccine was developed by the Army, with the government paying for clinical trials, too. Health officials want to be sure drugmaker Sanofi Pasteur doesn't make it unaffordable. -
The House GOP's bill to replace the Affordable Care Act would all but eliminate the requirement that people buy health insurance and shrink Medicaid coverage. It also cuts taxes for the wealthy. -
The Affordable Care Act is here to stay — for a while at least. NPR looks at tweaks that could help stabilize the health law's marketplaces.
-
House Republicans released their plan on Monday to redo the Affordable Care Act. Congressional Republicans have voted several times to repeal the law, but President Obama vetoed those attempts.
-
The White House is proposing changes to the Affordable Care Act to stabilize the insurance market as Congress moves to repeal and replace the sweeping health care law. -
While Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency, he repeatedly said he would get rid of the Affordable Care Act. What will happen to Obamacare? Also, we monitor how financial markets are doing.
-
Parents look for a place where their child will be loved and happy, but often have to make decisions based on cost and location. Researchers are looking for a rich developmental experience. -
Bosses are passing more of the cost of health insurance on to workers in an effort to keep spending under control. But that can be unfair to lower-income employees, who pay disproportionately more. -
Drug prices are a hot topic in politics. One company raised the price of a $1.50 drug to $750. Drugs to cure hepatitis C routinely cost more than $10,000 — and more for a full course of treatment.
