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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The president said on Thursday the Affordable Care Act is "dead. It's gone." The Senate is considering repeal legislation passed by the House, but Obamacare isn't faring as badly as Trump suggests. -
It's a weird twist: If the government refuses to reimburse insurance companies for cost-sharing subsidies, it could make health insurance a lot cheaper for people buying on the exchanges in 2018. -
Before the Affordable Care Act, rape victims could have been denied coverage for conditions tied to their assault. Some worry those practices could return if the current GOP health bill becomes law. -
In TV appearances and meetings with constituents, House Republicans are highlighting parts of the law that protect consumers, while glossing over loopholes that allow insurers to avoid paying. -
The version of the American Health Care Act passed by the House eliminates taxes on corporations and wealthy people and shrinks Medicaid coverage. A chart breaks down who would be affected and how. -
The House GOP's bill to replace the Affordable Care Act would all but eliminate the requirement that people buy health insurance and shrink Medicaid coverage. It also cuts taxes for the wealthy. -
After a series of changes, including one to create federal high-risk pools, the Republicans' health care plan is headed back to the House floor for a vote. The majority leader says it will pass. -
Insurance companies face deadlines to offer Affordable Care Act plans for next year, but lawmakers and the White House have left key decisions up in the air. -
The proposal allows states to put people with pre-existing conditions into high-risk pools and get rid of minimum health benefits for health insurance plans if they choose. -
The failure of the Republican health care plan gave new energy to state-level efforts to expand Medicaid. We look at three states where that may happen — Kansas, Maine and Virginia.
