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KFF’s policy research provides facts and analysis on a wide range of policy issues and public programs.
KFF designs, conducts and analyzes original public opinion and survey research on Americans’ attitudes, knowledge, and experiences with the health care system to help amplify the public’s voice in major national debates.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the organization’s core operating programs.
The Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker is an online hub monitoring how well the U.S. health system is operating through key quality and cost measures. A partnership of the Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF, the Tracker documents trends in Health Spending, Quality of Care, Access & Affordability, and Health & Wellbeing through issue briefs and downloadable chart collections. The Tracker also includes the Interactive Health Spending Explorer tool, which helps users analyze more than 50 years of health expenditure data, and a Health System Dashboard, which provides quick and easy access to the latest, most relevant statistics.
This chart collection examines five types of indicators: outcomes of treatment, provision of appropriate treatment, patient safety, preventive services, and health system capacity and workforce shortages. Measuring quality in health care is complex: a vast number of metrics are used to monitor health system performance since there is no singular definition of quality, and data is often limited and delayed.
Promoting price transparency in health care is a policy approach with bi-partisan support in Congress and the public at large. This analysis examines the vast troves of price transparency data that payers are required and finds unlikely prices, inconsistencies, and other oddities that pose major challenges for efforts to use it to promote competition and drive down prices.
This analysis compares 2021 data about deaths in the U.S. and 11 other large, wealthy countries by age and cause to understand the primary drivers of the longevity gap between the U.S. and the comparable countries. It finds that the primary reasons for the gap in 2021 were chronic disease, COVID-19 and substance use disorders.
This chart collection examines how life expectancy in the U.S. compares to that of other similarly large and wealthy countries. Between 2019 and 2022, the U.S. experienced a sharper decline and a slower rebound in life expectancy than peer countries, on average, due to increased mortality and premature death rates in the U.S. from the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, life expectancy in the U.S. returned to pre-pandemic levels, but remains lower than that of comparable countries.
This slideshow examines trends in U.S. health spending over time, including the share of household budgets devoted to health expenses and comparisons of out-of-pocket expenditures to money spent on insurance through 2021.
The Health Spending Explorer on the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker helps users examine five decades worth of numbers documenting expenditures by federal and local governments, private insurers, and individuals on 15 categories of health services, including hospitals, physician and clinic care, and prescription drugs.
This analysis finds that Medicare's negotiated prices for 10 high-expenditure prescription drugs are lower than what private Medicare drug plans had been paying, but still much higher than the prices available in 11 other wealthy nations.. It is available on the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker.
This interactive tool, updated with 2022 data, helps users understand health care costs vary by family size, income, insurance, and health status. Use the dropdown menus to explore scenarios and trends in household health spending.
High cost-sharing and expenses not covered by insurance leave some people with expensive medical bills. But costs are not the only barriers to health care access. According to KFF's new analysis, many adults can face logistical barriers to care, like work schedules or finding a doctor in network or appointment.
Recent trends in healthcare utilization and spending suggest that most spending on health services exceeds pre-pandemic levels and health costs are growing at a faster rate than in recent years. However, utilization of care has been uneven by setting and market.
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