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 new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll revealed Americans' attitudes toward the current political climate. Also, the Trump administration called for a cease-fire in Yemen.
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An administration proposal would link what Medicare pays for certain drugs administered in hospitals and doctor's offices to the prices paid in Europe and other advanced economies.
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What's on people's minds in rural America? A new poll shows that the addiction crisis and economic issues have people worried. But many retain an upbeat outlook about the future of their communities.
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A consortium of hospital systems and three foundations is moving ahead with a nonprofit drugmaker that would produce some of the generic medicines health care facilities need the most.
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Drug companies have infiltrated nearly every part of the process that determines how their drugs will be covered by Medicaid, an investigation by NPR and the Center for Public Integrity finds.
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A Senate investigation into prescription opioids in Missouri finds that pharmaceutical wholesalers had different standards for reporting suspicious orders to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
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Some patient groups, including the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network and the American Lung Association opposed the bill because they said it could do more harm than good.
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The 39-page drug price plan includes an array of ideas that the administration will consider, but it's unclear which ones will be implemented.
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There's no sign of a plan to stabilize the Affordable Care Act marketplaces in the new budget bill, but the agreement does provide a lot more money for other things in health care.
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Roger Severino created a new division in the Department of Health And Human Services to guard the religious rights of health care workers. That worries some advocates for women and LGBTQ people.