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.
-
Ballot initiatives in Utah, Nebraska and Idaho will determine whether to expand Medicaid, after legislators refused to do so. Montanans will vote on whether to keep the state's expansion intact. -
The governor of Arizona removed a doctor from the state's Medicaid drug committee and issued an executive order requiring disclosure of financial conflicts in response to a joint investigation by NPR and the Center for Public Integrity Investigation.
-
The Trump administration on Wednesday releases its final rule on short-term health policies that don't have the same consumer protections as plans governed by the Affordable Care Act.
-
Drug companies have infiltrated nearly every part of the process that determines how their drugs will be covered by Medicaid, an investigation by NPR and the Center for Public Integrity finds. -
A Senate investigation into prescription opioids in Missouri finds that pharmaceutical wholesalers had different standards for reporting suspicious orders to the Drug Enforcement Administration. -
The 39-page drug price plan includes an array of ideas that the administration will consider, but it's unclear which ones will be implemented. -
The report says many state laws that make it harder for women to get abortions don't have a medical purpose and can make outcomes worse. -
The proposed merger is the latest in a string of big health care business combinations, as companies within the industry look for leverage and savings. -
The Division of Conscience and Religious Freedom is being established to aid health workers with objections rooted in conscience or religion to treating certain people and performing some procedures. -
Republicans' tax overhaul gets rid of the tax penalty for people who fail to maintain insurance coverage. If it becomes law, what happens to the deficit and the number of uninsured?