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.
-
Medicare insurance plans for drugs vary widely in the medicines they cover. For 2016, some patients who pick the wrong plan could pay nearly $12,000 out of pocket annually for a single drug. -
About 15 percent of people in prison are infected with hepatitis C. Screening and treating inmates would save $750 million over 30 years and prevent many new cases in the general public. -
We're a nation of legal drug-takers, with 59 percent of adults using at least one prescription drug. That's up from 50 percent 10 years ago. Increased rates of obesity may be the cause. -
Open enrollment for Obamacare opens Sunday. Millions of people still lack health insurance, including some who signed up last year but later dropped their health coverage, calling it "unaffordable." -
Health plans sold on the federal exchange don't all include key specialists like psychiatrists and rheumatologists in network. That can mean paying a whole lot more for specialty care. -
Some people return to the emergency room again and again because it's their only source of medical care. A Wisconsin hospital hired social workers to help patients find more appropriate care. -
Independent pharmacies are getting pinched by reimbursements for generic drugs that aren't keeping up with rising prices. Drugstores blame the middlemen who manage companies' drug benefits. -
The 22 states that didn't ease Medicaid eligibility under Obamacare cover a much smaller percentage of their low-income residents than other states do and have seen their costs rise more. -
Researchers looking at changes in Medicare coverage found that many people leave privately run Medicare Advantage plans when their care gets particularly costly. -
More companies are adding deductibles to the insurance plans they offer their employees. And for people who already had to pay deductibles, the out-of-pocket outlays are growing.
