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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By combining a health insurer with a drugstore chain, CVS is looking to provide more care from its network of stores. The deal would also give the merged companies more clout with drugmakers. -
Top Congressional Republicans look to quickly reach a final deal on a tax package. And, we discuss what would be one of the largest mergers in the history of health care.
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The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine get very specific in their recommendations of actions they think the federal government should take to lower prescription drug costs. -
A federal judge ordered tobacco companies to pay for ads warning that their products are deadly and that they manipulated them to be addictive. But the form of the ads may be dulling their effect. -
The law restricts a major government public health agency's research into gun violence, which kills or injures more people than many other infectious diseases. -
The island is a major center for drug and medical device manufacturing. After Hurricane Maria, those products, including small IV bags, are running short throughout the U.S. -
If the former drug company executive is confirmed by the Senate, he would replace Dr. Tom Price, who resigned in September after a scandal involving government travel on private aircraft. -
Republicans have been toying with repealing the Affordable Care Act insurance mandate in their tax bill. The Congressional Budget Office says that would save money but make coverage much more costly. -
The former president, who has been reticent on policy issues, uses his star power to urge people to shop for health insurance as open enrollment opens on the exchanges. -
Proposals from Iowa and Massachusetts to create reinsurance that would lower health insurance premiums didn't get off the ground.
