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 committee will hold hearings on stabilizing the Obamacare markets in 2018. The chair called on President Trump to continue payments to insurers that help lower costs for low-income people. -
The Republican health care bill failed in part because of opposition to shrinking Medicaid. An 11-year-old girl with sickle cell anemia went to Washington, D.C., to make sure that wouldn't happen. -
The Republicans' last-ditch attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act now and replace it later would have caused insurance rates to soar, and millions could have lost coverage within a year. -
Senate Republicans are calling their health care bill the Better Care Reconciliation Act. It shares many provisions with the House's American Health Care Act, but goes further in cutting Medicaid. -
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.
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The Congressional Budget Office says millions of people would lose coverage under the proposed House bill. But the CBO's definition of insurance is more generous than what Republicans want. -
Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway says Medicaid block grants are part of the new administration's plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. -
A poll finds that 75 percent wants Congress to either leave the law alone or wait to repeal it until they have a new law. For most people, controlling high health care costs is top priority.
