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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.

There Are Many MAHAs

In a new column, Dr. Drew Altman, Founding President and CEO, dissects the MAHA “movement.” He writes: “There appear to be many MAHAs, not one. You can care about pesticides, or food additives, or vaccines, or child health, or corporate influence, or all of the above, to varying degrees. The reason so many Americans say they support MAHA when asked in polls is that, like a restaurant with a large menu, there is something in it for many Americans to select. But, the one thing they care about most—their health care costs—isn’t on the menu.”

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  • Medicare’s Role in Health-Care Payment Reform

    From Drew Altman

    In this column for The Wall Street Journal's Think Tank, Drew Altman explores whether Secretary Burwell's announcement this week about Medicare's payment reform initiative is another sign that the public sector is becoming the engine driving payment and delivery reform.

  • Harvard and Growth in Health Care Cost Sharing

    From Drew Altman

    In this column for The Wall Street Journal's Think Tank, Drew Altman explains why recent discussion of Harvard University’s introduction of new health insurance cost sharing measures amounted to “making a mountain out of a mole hill”.

  • High Health-Care Prices: More Talk Than Action

    From Drew Altman

    In this column for The Wall Street Journal's Think Tank, Drew Altman explores how price is the major factor that distinguishes the cost of our health care system from those in other developed nations, yet most efforts in the U.S. to address health-care costs don’t focus on price much at all.

  • Which Path for Health-Care Politics in 2015?

    From Drew Altman

    This was published as a Wall Street Journal Think Tank column on January 6, 2015. Yogi Berra said that when you come to a fork in the road, take it. It will be that kind of year for health-care politics. The status quo is not an option. The key to which path the Affordable Care Act takes is how the Supreme Court rules in King v. Burwell, the case that concerns whether subsidies in the health law can be…

  • Medicaid Expansion in Red States

    From Drew Altman

    In this column for The Wall Street Journal’s Think Tank, Drew Altman explains that Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam's decision on Medicaid expansion via the Affordable Care Act is the latest sign of pragmatism slowly winning over ideology in red states.

  • Our Fragmented Approach to Health-Care Costs

    From Drew Altman

    In his latest column for The Wall Street Journal's Think Tank, Drew Altman discusses this week's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services report on health spending and assesses the current effort to control health-care costs.

  • Poll: Ebola Was a Bigger Story Than the Midterms

    From Drew Altman

    For The Wall Street Journal’s Think Tank, Drew Altman discusses what the public was more concerned about in November: Ebola or the results of the midterm elections.

  • How 13 Million Americans Could Lose Insurance Subsidies

    From Drew Altman

    This was published as a Wall Street Journal Think Tank column on November 19, 2014. Kaiser Family Foundation calculations of how many Americans could lose subsidies in 2016 depending on the Supreme Court’s ruling in King v. Burwell. The Supreme Court is expected to rule next year on King v. Burwell, the lawsuit in which the federal government’s authority to provide financial assistance to people who buy insurance in federally operated insurance exchanges is being challenged under a…