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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Jacobus Pharmaceutical freely gives its experimental drug to patients with a rare disease. Now a rival wants FDA approval to sell its own version — and expects to charge at least $37,500 per year. -
Jacobus Pharmaceutical freely gives its experimental drug to patients with a rare disease. Now a rival wants FDA approval to sell its own version — and expects to charge at least $37,500 per year.
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Faced with 1 million people who left voice mails saying they wanted to buy health insurance, the federal government is giving people two more days to sign up on the federal exchange.
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A Senate investigation finds that Medicaid programs in 33 states spent more than $1 billion on the hepatitis C drug Sovaldi in a single year. -
The deadline for buying health insurance that starts Jan. 1 has arrived. Many people who lack coverage in 2016 will face fines that could reach thousands of dollars. -
The wave of mass shootings in the U.S. is renewing a debate over treating gun violence as a public health issue. Congress has stood in the way of federal funding for studying injuries and deaths. -
Millions of private medical records have been hacked at large insurance companies like Anthem. What appears to be causing more damage are smaller violations of medical privacy.
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Some companies have bought the patents for old drugs, then abruptly upped the prices — from $13 per pill to $750 in one case. Irate senators call it price gouging. -
Drug prices are a hot topic in politics. One company raised the price of a $1.50 drug to $750. Drugs to cure hepatitis C routinely cost more than $10,000 — and more for a full course of treatment.
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The wave of mass shootings in the U.S. is renewing a debate over treating gun violence as a public health issue. Congress has stood in the way of federal funding for studying injuries and deaths.
