Making KFF Less Mysterious Again
Occasionally, I devote this column to something about KFF.
I wrote previously about the basics of KFF, including our history, mission and what makes us tick. I discussed what I had in mind in the early 1990s when I founded what you all know now as KFF and how we’ve evolved: KFF Is a One-of-a-Kind Information Organization.
I also wrote about KFF’s Standards and Practices, including why we never take policy positions or make policy proposals: Questions I Get About the Standards and Practices for Organizations in an Era of Misinformation and Declining Trust. This is codified in a more detailed internal document that all our employees follow.
And I wrote about my reflections on our work in journalism and about health journalism more broadly, beginning in earnest with Kaisernetwork.org in 2000 and then dialing it up when I established what we now call KFF Health News in 2009: A Few Thoughts After Twenty-Five Years Half In and Half Out of Journalism.
Today, I’m writing about how we are cited and what we’re called in order to address occasional confusion about what KFF is and how we operate. I am under no illusion that one column will clear it all up, but because we are so public facing right now, I want to put a few facts about us on the record.
First, our name. As you have probably noticed, our data have been cited widely in the debate about the enhanced ACA premium tax credits. Most of the time when we’re cited, we’re called KFF, which is our name. But sometimes we are called Kaiser, or sometimes it’s The Kaiser Foundation or the Kaiser Family Foundation, which was our old name. Recently Senator Schumer, who certainly knows KFF, jokingly morphed us into KFC. And one anchor momentarily called us KKK on MSNBC before correcting herself. The presence is a good thing—it means we are doing our job—but not so much the name confusion.
We changed our name nearly three years ago to KFF. We did that because too many people still thought we had some connection to Kaiser Permanente (we have never had any), or that we were a foundation. The original Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation was created by the industrialist Henry Kaiser in 1948 as a typical family foundation. Separately, he also created Kaiser Permanente. But I founded what is now KFF in 1991 after the old foundation went through some tough times and internal dissent and a group of trustees led by the late Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, former Health and Human Services Secretary Joseph Califano, and a great public administrator and former journalist named Hale Champion, decided to start over and recruited me to do it.
Legally, KFF is a public charity. In plainer English, we are an endowed national nonprofit organization. We are an operating organization, meaning all our research, polling and journalism is done by us, in house, by our expert staff. In fact, we support ourselves about 70% from our own endowment and 30% from outside funds, mostly from foundations (more than 40). We don’t take any federal government or corporate funding. Since we study, poll about and report on what the government and private sector does and fails to do in health care, I don’t believe we should be funded by them, and our large endowment gives us the freedom to operate independently. It’s one of the characteristics of KFF that distinguishes us from most, if not all, other policy centers.
The name confusion gets worse. KFF actually does not stand for anything. It’s just KFF. The board and I thought about adopting a totally new name—you know, like Nexium—and decided to focus on our work instead of a multi-year campaign to establish a new name. I understand why folks would naturally convert KFF to Kaiser Family Foundation as with NPR (National Public Radio). Our goals in our semi-rebrand were very modest: to help people understand that we’re not affiliated with the HMO and that we’re not a foundation that makes grants. It has mostly worked but it’s not perfect. We knew that it would be imperfect when we did it.
Then there’s the additional issue of how we are cited, mainly in the press. This may be more important because it’s about our identity. We’re mostly described as a “health policy research organization,” or sometimes as a “health policy think tank.” We’re proud to be cited as often as we are but sometimes we aren’t described accurately, or fully accurately, because doing so takes too many words for editors to countenance.
KFF is a policy research organization, a polling and survey research organization, and a news organization, all in one. Those are our three main operating programs or divisions. The theory of the organization is to focus the policy research, the polling and the journalism on the same mission and the same issues at the same time, to give us the presence, reach and punch to play our role as an independent voice and source of information on national health issues. So, we’re not a health policy research organization or a polling organization, or a news organization. We’re a one-of-a-kind combination of all three—a different kind of information organization. I know it’s a lot of words to say “KFF, the health research, polling and news organization” and on my good days I accept that, but that is what we actually are. I also know it’s strange for news organizations to think of our newsroom as part of a larger nonprofit organization; except at KFF, that’s what it is. The newsroom is not a separate organization or legal entity. And by the way, describing us in a shorter form as “the health policy research and news organization” (combining analysis and polling as forms of research), would be accurate and okay.
A little more on this: KFF Health News has editorial independence for story ideas and content. Since I established the newsroom in 2009, that has never been compromised and will not be. But, when it comes to mission, strategic direction, new program initiatives, fundraising, hiring, and budget, the newsroom operates exactly as policy research and polling does. Our approximately 80 staff journalists are KFF employees just like everyone else. We don’t “fund” them; they work here. I am Executive Publisher.
Occasionally, there is also confusion about who does what at KFF. Our policy analysts are not reporters, and our reporters are not researchers. And our pollsters are pollsters. Each comes from different disciplinary backgrounds and has different jobs here. Our analysts are top national policy experts in various sub-fields of health policy; they are not reporters. Our pollsters are best-in-class survey researchers and leaders in their field. Our journalists are many of the top health policy editors and reporters in the country. And while that seems like it should be clear, sometimes we see mix-ups. For example, recently, one news organization cited a story written by longtime KFF Health News Senior Correspondent Phil Galewitz, which we placed in the Los Angeles Times, referring to Phil as an LA Times reporter and a related KFF poll as a KFF Health News poll. Phil, of course, works for us. The story appeared in the LA Times because we distribute all our stories for free to news organizations across the U.S.—in this case the LA Times—but they carry our byline. And KFF Health News does not conduct polls. In fact, when we do conduct polls with news organizations, we do them as partnerships with outside news organizations (37 major survey projects with the Washington Post), which can devote substantial space and reporting effort to them. With our distribution model at KFF Health News, we cannot guarantee that our polls and surveys, which are often costly to do, will get significant coverage when we send them to distribution partners.
Then there is the “think tank” thing. We do think, I hope. And a lot. But I have never met a think tank that operates a polling organization or the largest health newsroom in the country. And to cite a difference with many, but not all think tanks, all of the more than 2,000 KFF products a year are organizational products with priorities for what we do set at the top of KFF; nothing is decentralized in centers or institutes and they are not the intellectual property of fellows or scholars who work on them; they are KFF products reviewed up the chain through an elaborate quality control process. This also differentiates us from every academic policy center. It may be convenient shorthand to call us a think tank, and the definition is admittedly a bit grey, but we are an operating organization with, as I said, three parts.
I don’t believe there is another combined policy research/polling/news organization in any other sector, so it’s not surprising that we are a little confusing. We can and must do better explaining ourselves even though it’s been 35 years since we started. In the end, the work matters far more than the subtle quest to establish a different kind of information organization. But it’s also not that hard to describe us correctly more of the time.
