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 state took Suboxone strips for treatment of opioid abuse off the list of approved drugs for Medicaid. Some patients say the alternatives aren't working for them. -
Congress approved an amalgam of more than a dozen proposals that will expand access to medication-assisted treatment. It also will encourage police to send drug users to treatment rather than to jail. -
The deductibles that most people actually pay are much lower than those advertised because of subsidies, according to a report released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. -
A new NPR poll shows about a third of working adults have no sick leave, even as more people are living with chronic health problems that require regular care. -
The government is raising the limit on the number of patients a doctor can treat for opioid addiction using the drug buprenorphine to 275 from 100. The move expands office-based treatment options. -
The state this week became the 31st in the nation to expand Medicaid to the working poor. It's also the first state in the Deep South to embrace the Obamacare program. -
For the first time the nation's pediatricians point to bullying, both online and in real life, as increasing the risk of suicide for teenagers. -
Hospital deaths are more expensive and intrusive than deaths at home, in hospice care or even in nursing homes. Financial incentives favor more care, even when it's not always wanted. -
Opioid addiction treatment is a growth market, and private equity firms are buying up treatment centers and chains. But it's too soon to say how this might affect access to care and quality. -
Back in 1983, Congress authorized a public health emergency fund. But the pot of money was never very substantial and it hasn't been replenished. The fund now stands at $57,000.
