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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Rather than sweeping reform, Clinton's health plan is a collection of tweaks to the Affordable Care Act. The proposed changes are aimed at trimming consumer costs and improving coverage. -
Health insurers are trying to spark a price war by refusing to pay for some brand-name medications unless they get a big discount. This forces some people to change their prescriptions. -
The deadline to sign up for an Obamacare health insurance plan starting on Jan. 1 was extended until Friday because the web site was overwhelmed. Demand was up, but that might be because the penalties for not having insurance are increasing.
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Drug prices are a hot topic in politics. One company raised the price of a $1.50 drug to $750. Drugs to cure hepatitis C routinely cost more than $10,000 — and more for a full course of treatment.
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Open enrollment for Obamacare opens Sunday. Millions of people still lack health insurance, including some who signed up last year but later dropped their health coverage, calling it "unaffordable." -
Independent pharmacies are getting pinched by reimbursements for generic drugs that aren't keeping up with rising prices. Drugstores blame the middlemen who manage companies' drug benefits. -
Researchers looking at changes in Medicare coverage found that many people leave privately run Medicare Advantage plans when their care gets particularly costly.
