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 Senate investigation into prescription opioids in Missouri finds that pharmaceutical wholesalers had different standards for reporting suspicious orders to the Drug Enforcement Administration. -
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. -
The Department of Health and Human Services is expected to announce the creation of a new division to protect health workers who object to procedures for religious reasons.
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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 law restricts a major government public health agency's research into gun violence, which kills or injures more people than many other infectious diseases. -
President Trump says the administration will no longer pay key Affordable Care Act subsidies. The result could be some consumers pay more for insurance coverage and the cost to the government rises.
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Republicans are taking one last shot at repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. But the new plan isn't much different from the last one that failed. -
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.
