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The Kaiser Health Policy News Index is designed to help journalists and policymakers understand which health policy-related news stories Americans are paying attention to, and what the public understands about health policy issues covered in the news. This month’s Index finds that news about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) enrollment numbers was followed by more than half the public, ranking behind two non-health news stories (the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls and the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia).

This month’s Health Policy News Index finds more than six in 10 say they followed
news about long waiting lists for those seeking care at Veterans Affairs (VA) medical facilities closely.
That makes the VA story the most closely followed health story in the first half of 2014, with slightly
more people following it than followed several ACA enrollment stories earlier this year.

In this column for The Wall Street Journal’s Think Tank, Drew Altman reviews indicators pointing to the Affordable Care Act cooling as a front-page issue, while hot debate continues about it among partisans and experts.

Other than the big stories of Ferguson, Ebola and ISIS, the only other news which captured a majority of the public’s attention this month was President Obama’s executive order on immigration. Smaller, yet substantial, shares report closely following many health policy news stories this month. Over four in ten say they closely followed the lawsuit filed by House Republicans against President Obama over the implementation of the health care law and about a third say they followed a change in the official estimate for the number of people that enrolled in health insurance during the ACA’s first open enrollment period and the ACA’s second open enrollment period. The least closely followed health policy story of those asked about this month, was coverage of comments about the ACA made by MIT health economist, Jonathan Gruber

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.

In this column for The Wall Street Journal’s Think Tank, Drew Altman analyzes the Kaiser Health Policy News Index to determine which health stories in the news have broken through to the public the most in the last year. One conclusion: it wasn’t the Affordable Care Act.

This column was published as a Wall Street Journal Think Tank column on November 21, 2016. Early media coverage of the Republican health-care agenda has concentrated on plans to repeal and then replace the Affordable Care Act. The larger story is GOP preparations for a health policy trifecta: to fundamentally change the…

Five Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured reports released at a policy briefing profile the growing uninsured population and portray the health care safety net as increasingly strained to meet uninsured people’s needs. News Release Covering the Uninsured: Growing Need, Strained Resources Federal Spending on the Health Care Safety…

Health News Index March/April, 2005 The March/April Kaiser Health Poll Report featured topic explores the public’s views on the Medicare prescription drug benefit. This featured topic covers the historical perspective from before the law was passed as well as current views and understanding of the benefit, including how seniors are…

In 2003, researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard School of Public Health completed an analysis of trends in attention to and knowledge about health news using data from all Health News Index tracking surveys between 1996 and 2002. The resulting article, “Health News and the American Public, 1996-2002,”…