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.
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Repeal of the Affordable Care Act is politically dangerous for Republicans unless they can pass a replacement that covers many of the people who benefit from the health care law.
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The premiums on benchmark plans are increasing by an average of 22 percent in 2017, the government says, but more than 70 percent of people can get one for less than $75 a month after subsidies. -
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. -
Three former leaders of an influential task force that issues guidelines for preventive care says insurance coverage for highly rated tests and services shouldn't be mandatory. -
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. -
A Wisconsin clinic provides free dental care so that poor rural residents can get their teeth fixed. But in most states people aren't so lucky. Millions of people have no access to dental care. -
The state this week became the 31st in the nation to expand Medicaid to the working poor. It's also the first state in the Deep South to embrace the Obamacare program. -
The Democratic presidential candidate this week floated the idea of allowing people over 50 to "buy in" to Medicare. NPR looks at how that would affect health care costs for everyone else. -
White women are dying at a slightly younger age than in the past, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The same report shows the average life expectancy for non-Hispanic black men increased. NPR reports about the possible causes behind these numbers.
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The Affordable Care Act has increased access to doctors and helped reduce medical costs. But poll data show 26 percent of U.S. families are still struggling to pay their health care bills.
