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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A quirk in the law gives an older opioid addiction treatment "orphan drug" status — and a period of exclusive market access. That may prevent some new therapies from reaching patients for years. -
The Trump administration wants to increase transparency in prescription drug pricing. But health economists say the administration's call to tie prices to what other nations pay might work better. -
Voters in Idaho, Utah and Nebraska approved ballot initiatives to expand Medicaid, overcoming roadblocks that had kept an estimated 300,000 people from obtaining coverage. -
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. -
Though the federal government is changing its policy of separating immigrant children and parents, some children who were detained may suffer ongoing health consequences from the trauma. -
The Department of Health and Human Services is releasing more details of the President Trump's plan to reduce drug prices, including a new web site.
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The federal funding of the program lapsed in September. States have been burning through leftover funds, or borrowing from other accounts, as they wait for Congress to act before the end of January. -
The U.S. government is scheduled to make large payments to health insurance companies to help offset discounts required by the Affordable Care Act. President Trump has threatened to stop the payments.
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Most of the millions in the U.S. who are infected with hepatitis C can't afford the cure. Some say the U.S. could save money and cure more people if it bought the drugmaker Gilead Sciences Inc. -
