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From Drew Altman

Drew Altman is president and chief executive officer of KFF, a position he has held for more than 30 years since founding the modern-day KFF organization in the 1990s. He is a leading expert on national health policy issues and an innovator in health journalism and the nonprofit field.

View full bio | Read Dr. Altman's Beyond the Data columns

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President’s Message

“KFF is an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. We have three major program areas: KFF Policy; KFF Polling; and KFF Health News (formerly Kaiser Health News), which conducts specialized public health information campaigns. Learn more about the organization. 

What’s unique about KFF, however, can’t be found in any description of our programs because we’re more than a sum of our parts. KFF is a one-of-a-kind information organization. Not a policy research organization. Not a polling organization. And not a news organization. But rather, a unique combination of all three. That’s the vision behind KFF, and it's this combination that allows us to leverage our combined expertise and assets to play our national role on health policy.” Read more

Beyond the Data

In his “Beyond the Data” columns, Drew Altman discusses what the data, polls, and journalism produced by KFF mean for policy and for people.

BTD column on New Mexico

Doing More and Defying Labels in New Mexico

In a new column, Dr. Drew Altman, KFF’s Founding President and CEO, discusses how New Mexico made childcare universal and became the only state to fully replace lost enhanced ACA tax credits while its leaders avoided polarizing labels like “progressive or “socialist.”

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  • Americans’ Health Priorities Diverge From Washington’s Focus on Obamacare

    From Drew Altman

    In this column for The Wall Street Journal's Think Tank, Drew Altman finds the public’s healthcare priorities have more to do with drug costs and other real world issues people deal with using the health care system than the ongoing partisan wrangling over the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

  • At Tax Time, No Public Backlash Over Obamacare’s Individual Mandate

    From Drew Altman

    This was published as a Wall Street Journal Think Tank column on April 21, 2015. Tax season has come and gone with no great outbreak of protest about the Affordable Care Act’s least popular provision: the individual mandate. This central element of the ACA was included to help ensure that the individual insurance market would have balanced pools of healthier people and sicker people to help spread insurance risk and keep premiums reasonable. While most of the…

  • Why Low Growth in Health Costs Still Stings

    From Drew Altman

    This was published as a Wall Street Journal Think Tank column on April 8, 2015. In my last Think Tank piece, I reported that just 3% of Americans felt health costs had been rising more slowly than usual, even though they have been growing at record low rates in recent years. The chart above shows why that might be the case: The gap is widening between growth in wages and what workers pay for health premiums and…

  • Americans Don’t Feel the Slowdown in Health Costs

    From Drew Altman

    In this column for The Wall Street Journal's Think Tank, Drew Altman discusses why the health policy agenda may shift to focus more on affordability of coverage, consumer protection and consumer information in coming years.