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 report released by Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill says the cozy relationship between pain advocacy groups and pharmaceutical companies may have played a key role in the opioid crisis. -
Brenda Fitzgerald, director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, resigned on Wednesday because of financial conflicts of interest. The chief public health official bought stocks in tobacco and health care companies after she started working at the agency.
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Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway are launching an effort to make health care simpler and cheaper for their own workers. The announcement sent health company stock prices lower.
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Alex Azar spent five years in charge of Eli Lilly & Co.'s U.S. operations. During his tenure, the prices for the company's insulin products more than doubled. -
The Division of Conscience and Religious Freedom is being established to aid health workers with objections rooted in conscience or religion to treating certain people and performing some procedures. -
The Department of Health and Human Services is expected to announce the creation of a new division to protect health workers who object to procedures for religious reasons.
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The move comes one day after the Trump administration said it would let states add work requirements to their Medicaid programs, which provide health coverage for people with low incomes. -
Ten states have already asked the administration to add work requirements to the popular health insurance program for low-income people. But many recipients are already working. -
Republicans' tax overhaul gets rid of the tax penalty for people who fail to maintain insurance coverage. If it becomes law, what happens to the deficit and the number of uninsured?
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The federal funding of the program lapsed in September. States have been burning through leftover funds, or borrowing from other accounts, as they wait for Congress to act before the end of January.
