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 new Trump administration rule allows consumers to buy health care plans that are exempt from certain Affordable Care Act rules — and therefore cheaper. -
Drug companies have infiltrated nearly every part of the process that determines how their drugs will be covered by Medicaid, an investigation by NPR and the Center for Public Integrity finds. -
A Senate investigation into prescription opioids in Missouri finds that pharmaceutical wholesalers had different standards for reporting suspicious orders to the Drug Enforcement Administration. -
Several states are considering requiring that Medicaid recipients work to maintain their health coverage. In Kentucky, one such requirement has been stalled in court. -
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 Justice Department has announced it will not defend the Affordable Care Act in an ongoing lawsuit brought by 20 states that challenge the legality of core pillars of the law. -
Some patient groups, including the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network and the American Lung Association opposed the bill because they said it could do more harm than good. -
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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Celgene Corp. has thwarted rival drugmakers eager to make cheaper versions of medicines for a form of blood cancer. Now administration officials are criticizing practices they say hold generics back. -
After criticism that the administration's blueprint for drug prices was vague, the secretary of health and human services zeroed in on actions that he said need only his signature.
