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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.

Are Employer Health Costs Out of Control?   

In a new column, President and CEO Dr. Drew Altman dissects the conventional wisdom that employer health costs are “out of control.” He writes that “the story this year is not about out-of-control employer health costs—they were moderate—or of a collapsing employer-based insurance system, although it certainly has many problems, including being propped up by a $470 billion annual tax subsidy. Instead, the story this year seems to be a conspicuous shift of premium costs to workers despite a moderate overall premium increase.”

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  • New Evidence Health Spending Is Growing Faster Again

    From Drew Altman

    In this column for The Wall Street Journal’s Think Tank, Drew Altman discusses new Census Department survey data showing higher health spending growth over the last four economic quarters, and raises the question: is the health spending slowdown over?

  • Seniors and Income Inequality: How Things Get Worse With Age

    From Drew Altman

    In this column for The Wall Street Journal’s Think Tank, Drew Altman discusses why seniors need to be included in the national discussion on income inequality, especially as proposals to change Medicare and Social Security are considered.

  • King v. Burwell and Media Coverage

    From Drew Altman

    In this column for The Wall Street Journal’s Think Tank, Drew Altman lays out the news media’s challenge covering the upcoming Supreme Court King v. Burwell decision about the ACA.

  • 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…