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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.
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This policy watch provides an update on the status of abortion restrictions in states that passed a constitutional amendment protecting abortion, or where a state court previously interpreted the state constitution as protecting abortion access.
This report summarizes the major findings from KFF and HMA case studies in five U.S. communities, highlighting cross-cutting themes and the degree to which low-income women in diverse communities face challenges in accessing reproductive and sexual health care, as well as promising initiatives established by community providers to address barriers and improve access to these basic services.
As policy debates over the future of access to reproductive and sexual health services heat up at the national and state levels, understanding how these policies are playing out on the ground requires getting beyond the statistics.
In context of the rapidly growing number of older adults in the U.S. and increasing challenges that this population faces, the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a large scale, nationally representative telephone survey to better understand people’s expectations about later life and efforts they’ve taken to plan for if they become seriously ill. To learn more about the experiences of those with serious illness specifically, this survey also included interviews with adults who are either personally age 65 or older living with a serious illness, or have an older family member who is or was before they recently died.
In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, community health centers are serving as public health responders, especially for medically underserved populations. Health centers are a national network of safety net primary care providers who provided care to nearly 30 million patients in 2019, and disproportionately serve patients who are low-income, persons of color, uninsured, or publicly insured – groups that have been especially hard hit by the pandemic. This brief examines how health centers have adapted their service delivery models during the pandemic response and the current challenges they face continuing to meet patients’ needs.
Community health centers provide essential access to comprehensive primary care in underserved communities. This issue brief describes health centers and their patients in 2016 and examines changes in access to care and utilization of services by health center patients following implementation of the ACA coverage expansions in 2014.
Managed care organizations (MCOs) cover nearly two-thirds of all Medicaid beneficiaries nationwide, making managed care the nation’s dominant delivery system for Medicaid enrollees. As the entities responsible for providing comprehensive Medicaid benefits to enrollees by contracting with providers, managed care plans play a critical role in shaping access to care for Medicaid enrollees. Many plan actions are dictated by state policy or contracting requirements; however, plans also have some flexibility to design payment and delivery systems and structure enrollees’ experiences using their coverage. To understand how Medicaid managed care plans approach access to care and the challenges they face in ensuring such access, the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a survey of plans in 2017.
The COVID-19 pandemic has coincided with worsening mental health across the country, and California is no exception. This data note find that in California in 2020, many nonelderly adults experienced poor mental health and did not receive needed care.
This analysis from KFF and Epic Research finds that telehealth visits for outpatient mental health and substance use services went from virtually zero percent in 2019 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic to a peak of 40% in mid-2020 – and continued to account for more than a third of such visits in the six months ending in August 2021.
On KFF’s 21st annual Medicaid budget survey, all responding states reported at least one initiative to expand behavioral health care in Medicaid, including crisis service and other benefit expansions, initiatives to expand telehealth and address equity, and managed care changes.
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