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 Affordable Care Act is here to stay — for a while at least. NPR looks at tweaks that could help stabilize the health law's marketplaces.
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The Affordable Care Act, passed by Democrats during Obama's presidency, has its weaknesses, but the data show it's not at all "exploding." We have the facts behind what's going on. -
House Republicans are considering a deal that would remove the requirement that health insurance plans cover 10 essential health benefits, hoping to secure the votes of conservative lawmakers. -
Most of the people on Medicaid are elderly, disabled or children, so a GOP proposal to require able-bodied recipients to work probably won't add up to big cost savings, analysts say. -
As the GOP bill to replace the Affordable Care Act begins to move through Congress, reporters for NPR and Kaiser answer your questions about what it might mean for your health plan. -
Most of the millions in the U.S. who are infected with hepatitis C can't afford the cure. Some say the U.S. could save money and cure more people if it bought the drugmaker Gilead Sciences Inc. -
Some members of Congress say the U.S. government should use the patent rights it owns for any drugs that were developed with federal grants to drive down the prices of those drugs. -
The Congressional Budget Office says millions of people would lose coverage under the proposed House bill. But the CBO's definition of insurance is more generous than what Republicans want. -
The House Republican health care proposal to replace Obamacare may not cut costs, increase choices or boost coverage in the end. -
House Republicans released their plan on Monday to redo the Affordable Care Act. Congressional Republicans have voted several times to repeal the law, but President Obama vetoed those attempts.
