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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President Trump issued an executive order on health care today. The order would remove requirements for basic benefits that are part of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. He is telling federal agencies to permit wider use of so-called "association health plans" which currently do not meet the requirements for basic benefits like maternity care.
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Conservatives have long advocated for using association health plans to boost competition. But the result could be that healthy people pay less and sicker people are priced out of coverage. -
With a new regulation, the administration will allow any company or nonprofit group to refuse to cover contraception by claiming a religious or moral exemption to the federal health law. -
To manage the volume of gunshot victims from a mass shooting Sunday night that occurred along the Las Vegas Strip, local hospitals used ambulance bays and hallways as triage locations. -
The Congressional Budget Office says it won't have time to analyze all the impacts of the latest GOP effort to repeal the ACA, but it says millions more would be uninsured than under current law. -
The future of the latest Republican effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act remains in question after two Republican senators have come out firmly against it, as others remain doubtful.
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The bill's sponsors say their plan to reallocate federal health funding among states is more equitable. It also would cause largely Democratic states to lose funding while Republican states gain.
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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 federal government has cut advertising for the Affordable Care Act's enrollment period by 90 percent. So insurer Oscar Health has started its own campaign in New York and five other states. -
Senators holding hearings this week are looking for quick tweaks that will stabilize the insurance markets and make policies cheaper. Some governors want more federal money and more flexibility.
