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.
-
A new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that many people struggle to pay for medicines and that a majority of Americans would welcome a range of government interventions to lower prices. -
Senators called pharmaceutical industry leaders to account for the high costs of medicine during a Senate hearing. The executives deflected blame to insurance companies and middlemen. -
With almost 10,000 stores across the country, CVS says it is already where consumers are. The company is transforming some of its stores and their retail clinics into hubs for a wider range of care. -
Remarkably little is known about the fundamentals of how a woman carries a baby inside her. Two Columbia University researchers aim to change that, to reduce the number of kids born too soon. -
Pharmacy benefit managers are the focus of proposed regulations that could reduce drug costs for seniors and cut profits for middlemen. It could set a precedent for the broader market. -
The idea, they say, would be to eliminate the health insurance industry and replace it with government-run health insurance. The industry is already gearing up to oppose any moves in that direction. -
Congressional Democrats want to protect health coverage and protections of the Affordable Care Act. With the Senate in Republican hands, House Democrats will hold hearings and may turn to the courts. -
A recent study shows the cost of brand-name drugs is rising — not because of expensive new therapies entering the market but because manufacturers are raising prices on existing drugs. -
The pace of enrollment in Affordable Care Act plans was slower than in past years. About 8.5 million people enrolled in health plans for 2019 through the federal HealthCare.gov. -
To protect a developing fetus from experimental drugs or treatments that might cause birth defects, pregnant women aren't included in many clinical trials. But that limits the safety evidence, too.
