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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 four major program areas: KFF Policy; KFF Polling; KFF Health News (formerly Kaiser Health News); and KFF Social Impact Media, 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.

Medicare Beneficiaries Are Not Luddites

In a new column, President and CEO Dr. Drew Altman discusses new KFF survey data that shows that a surprising share of older adults with Medicare are using health tech regularly, and a solid majority support many of CMS’ goals to make it more widely available. But there are also big income gaps in the use of health tech, and concerns about AI, privacy, and other barriers to rapid and more widespread adoption. “Apparently… a lot of Medicare beneficiaries—but not all beneficiaries equally—are ready for more health tech, and have become tech savvy to survive,” Altman writes.

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  • An Opportunity Amid the VA Problems

    From Drew Altman

    This was published as a Wall Street Journal Think Tank column on May 30, 2014.   Gen. Eric Shinseki resigned when it became clear that the problems in the VA health-care system were systemic, not one-off acts of a few bad apples.

  • Avoiding the Wrong Lessons From the VA and HealthCare.gov Problems

    From Drew Altman

    This was published as a Wall Street Journal Think Tank column on May 27, 2014. Problems with the launch of HealthCare.gov and with veterans hospitals allegedly concealing long waits for care feed a narrative that government doesn’t work. But many government programs, including Medicare and Social Security, work well.

  • The Next Big Health-Care Issue

    From Drew Altman

    Drew Altman, in The Wall Street Journal‘s Think Tank, writes that the next big concern for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will be how much premiums increase in exchanges for 2015. He discusses the factors to focus on to put this issue in perspective when states report premium increases.

  • The Twin Goals of Health Insurance

    From Drew Altman

    Drew Altman, in The Wall Street Journal's Think Tank, examines a study finding Massachusetts' health reform saved lives in the context of health insurance's twin goal: better access to improve health and economic security.

  • The Health-Cost Problem Is Coming Back

    From Drew Altman

    Drew Altman, in The Wall Street Journal’s Think Tank, discusses how the conversation will soon shift back to health-care costs from health coverage, because they are rising more sharply again. And as the discussion turns back, he says that because there is no national agreement on a strategy to address increasing costs, current efforts in the public and private sector, however fragmented and uncoordinated, will need to step up their game.

  • What People Don’t Realize About the Affordable Care Act

    From Drew Altman

    Drew Altman, in The Wall Street Journal’s Think Tank, discusses what people don’t realize about the ACA: it is engineered for variation and it is up to Congress and the states to learn from that variation.

  • Those Long Lines To Enroll In The ACA

    From Drew Altman

    In this Policy Insight, Kaiser Family Foundation President and CEO Drew Altman discusses the need for community based outreach to enroll the long term uninsured.

  • A Tale of Two Siblings, the ACA, and the Supreme Court

    From Drew Altman

    In a column published on The Huffington Post, Kaiser Family Foundation President and CEO Drew Altman shows how the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to make the ACA Medicaid expansion a state option has upended the health insurance system for low and moderate income people in many states and discusses how the states and federal government can address the problem.