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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Throughout the U.S., subsidies are available to reduce the price of 2019 policies sold on state and federal insurance exchanges. But promotion of the insurance is varying widely from state to state. -
Ballot initiatives in Utah, Nebraska and Idaho will determine whether to expand Medicaid, after legislators refused to do so. Montanans will vote on whether to keep the state's expansion intact. -
An administration proposal would link what Medicare pays for certain drugs administered in hospitals and doctor's offices to the prices paid in Europe and other advanced economies. -
What's on people's minds in rural America? A new poll shows that the addiction crisis and economic issues have people worried. But many retain an upbeat outlook about the future of their communities.
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New short-term insurance policies will likely be cheaper than Affordable Care Act plans. But those lower prices mean they won't pay for as much health care. -
People can soon buy health insurance that may be cheaper than Obamacare. It however is not required to cover as many medical services and is exempt from covering people with pre-existing conditions.
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A consortium of hospital systems and three foundations is moving ahead with a nonprofit drugmaker that would produce some of the generic medicines health care facilities need the most. -
In signs the health care market may be maturing, an analysis of insurance filings shows premiums will rise less than 4 percent on average and companies plan to market more policies in more places. -
A survey by the research group NORC at the University of Chicago shows 57 percent of American adults have been surprised by a health care bill that their insurance didn't pay for. -
The New York Police Department told NPR that Frieden allegedly "grabbed a victim's buttocks without her permission" last October.
