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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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.
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A man shows up in the emergency room with a speedy, irregular heartbeat, but can't say when it first went awry. No problem. The ER doctors just checked the phone records of his fitness tracker. -
The American College of Physicians will lobby Congress to allow the re-importation of medicines from other countries and to let Medicare bargain with drugmakers over price. Will lawmakers go along? -
The program was tested in YMCAs around the country, and helped people lose about 5 percent of their body weight in a year. The goal is to make it a Medicare-eligible prevention program. -
The giant health insurer says Express Scripts, a manager of drug benefits, should be passing along more of the savings it negotiates with drugmakers. -
Patients switching to generic medicines and hard bargaining with drugmakers helped moderate spending on prescription drugs in 2015, according to Express Scripts, a manager of drug benefits.
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Patients switching to generic medicines and hard bargaining with drugmakers helped moderate spending on prescription drugs in 2015, according to Express Scripts, a manager of drug benefits.
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An NPR poll finds that many people have a low opinion of the health care system, yet they like their doctors. The perception of quality of care varies according to income. -
The agency plans to reduce the incentive for doctors to use the most expensive drugs and link prices to patient outcomes, perhaps paying less when patients have to be admitted to a hospital. -
The Affordable Care Act has increased access to doctors and helped reduce medical costs. But poll data show 26 percent of U.S. families are still struggling to pay their health care bills.
