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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Republicans are taking one last shot at repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. But the new plan isn't much different from the last one that failed.
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The federal government has cut advertising for the Affordable Care Act's enrollment period by 90 percent. So insurer Oscar Health has started its own campaign in New York and five other states.
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The president has already called the opioid crisis an emergency. If he makes it official through a formal declaration, more money and personnel could be available to deal with the epidemic.
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With price hikes and rising demand, the drug naloxone, which can reverse an opioid overdose, is taking up an ever-larger share of emergency department budgets.
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A Senate committee will hold hearings on stabilizing the Obamacare markets in 2018. The chair called on President Trump to continue payments to insurers that help lower costs for low-income people.
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The Senate's proposed rollback of the Medicaid expansion could cut off mental health benefits to many people who have gotten care for the first time as a result of the Affordable Care Act.
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The administration's proposed budget would cut billions out of health programs at the NIH, CDC and FDA, as well as Medicaid services for children, the elderly and disabled.
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President Trump is promising great things from the revised version of the Republican health care bill. He said it would lower premiums, increase competition and protect people with pre-existing conditions "beautifully."
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The Auvi-Q epinephrine injector was pulled from the market in 2015 because of quality concerns. Now, the drug's maker says the problems have been solved and Auvi-Q will be available again in 2017.
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A Wisconsin clinic provides free dental care so that poor rural residents can get their teeth fixed. But in most states people aren't so lucky. Millions of people have no access to dental care.