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 seniors of tomorrow will have much higher rates of diabetes and obesity than the seniors of today, according to a data analysis. That means higher medical bills for them — and for taxpayers, too. -
The extended debate in Congress over emergency funding for a response to the Zika virus is forcing public health departments to cut existing prevention and treatment programs. -
The Democratic presidential candidate this week floated the idea of allowing people over 50 to "buy in" to Medicare. NPR looks at how that would affect health care costs for everyone else. -
The Food and Drug Administration has issued sweeping new rules that tighten its control over e-cigarettes, banning their sale to minors. The agency is also expanding its regulation of tobacco. -
An increasing number of opioid abusers are taking huge doses of Imodium to ease withdrawal symptoms or get high. But at those high doses, toxicologists warn, the normally safe drug can stop the heart. -
You may be paying $38,000 more for that knee replacement than someone in another state, or even a few hundred miles down the road. And there doesn't seem to be any method to this madness.
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Suicide, drug abuse and alcohol have started to shorten the lives of white women, a U.S. report on data from 2013 to 2014 suggests. Life-expectancy for many black men went up from 71.8 years to 72.2. -
Blaming a lack of profitability, UnitedHealth says it will drop out of most health marketplaces insurance exchanges next year. The insurer's first quarter profits in 2016 were $1.6 billion. -
If UnitedHealth stops selling insurance on marketplaces across the country (and isn't replaced by rivals), premiums for exchange plans could rise modestly — about 1 percent on average. -
A Medicare project will test a new approach for paying primary care doctors that could save money while encouraging physicians to explore alternative ways to serve patients.
