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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EpiPen, the new poster child for prescription drug price gouging, may find that offering discount coupons isn't enough to mollify its critics in Congress and online. -
Lawmakers are demanding answers as to why the price of EpiPens, which are used to stop life-threatening allergic reaction, keeps going up. The company said Thursday it will reimburse some of the cost. -
The exit of insurers from exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act represents a fresh challenge to the viability of the president's signature health care law. -
Insurers have released the latest lists of prescription drugs they won't cover in 2017. Express Scripts is excluding 85 drugs and CVS Caremark, 131. Some drugs for diabetes and asthma are out. -
Drugs that consist of proteins and antibodies typically made by living organisms represent the new frontier in drug industry competition. -
The deductibles that most people actually pay are much lower than those advertised because of subsidies, according to a report released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. -
The state this week became the 31st in the nation to expand Medicaid to the working poor. It's also the first state in the Deep South to embrace the Obamacare program. -
The seniors of tomorrow will have much higher rates of diabetes and obesity than the seniors of today, according to a data analysis. That means higher medical bills for them — and for taxpayers, too. -
The Democratic presidential candidate this week floated the idea of allowing people over 50 to "buy in" to Medicare. NPR looks at how that would affect health care costs for everyone else. -
Blaming a lack of profitability, UnitedHealth says it will drop out of most health marketplaces insurance exchanges next year. The insurer's first quarter profits in 2016 were $1.6 billion.
