The independent source for health policy research, polling, and news.
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.
Disparities in health and health care for people of color and underserved groups are longstanding challenges. This brief provides an introduction to what health and health care disparities are, why it is important to address disparities, the status of disparities today, recent federal actions to address disparities, and key issues related to addressing disparities looking ahead.
With the COVID-19 pandemic impacting communities of color disproportionately in their health and economic well-being, long-term racial and ethnic disparities have received growing attention. But these inequities in our health system are not new and are a part of larger issues of systemic racism.
Provisions in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) require states to maintain continuous Medicaid enrollment for enrollees until the end of the month when the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) ends. When the continuous enrollment requirements end and states resume redeterminations and disenrollments, individuals with LEP may be at increased risk of losing Medicaid coverage or experiencing a gap in coverage due to barriers completing these processes, even if they remain eligible for coverage.
Rapidly rising rates of deaths by suicide and drug overdose among people of color, along with disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, further underscore inequities in access to mental health care and treatment and highlight the importance of centering equity in diagnostics, care, and treatment.
While climate change effects ripple across the world and all populations, it is poised to disproportionately affect people of color, low-income communities, immigrants, and other high-need groups.
This infographic provides data on the current status of health and health care for Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders (NHOPIs), including measures of their health coverage, health access and use, and health outcomes.
A small number of states, as well as some local jurisdictions, are reporting race/ethnicity data on MPX cases and vaccinations and these data show a disproportionate impact of MPX cases on Black and Hispanic people. The data available to date on vaccinations also suggest that Black and Hispanic people are receiving smaller shares of vaccinations despite accounting for larger shares of cases.
This brief provides an overview of recent data on cancer incidence and mortality, risk factors, screening, treatment, and outcomes by race and ethnicity. Racial disparities in cancer incidence and outcomes are well-documented, with research showing that they are driven by a combination of structural, economic, and socioenvironmental inequities that are rooted in racism and discrimination, as well as genetic and hereditary factors that may be influenced by the environment.
Data show that children’s vaccination rates, including MMR and seasonal flu vaccines, have declined in recent years largely due to decreases in vaccinations among White and Asian children. At the same time, and despite the declines among White and Asian children, Black and AIAN children remain least likely to have received recommended childhood vaccinations and the MMR vaccine specifically.
The uninsured rate has fallen among all racial and ethnic groups under the Affordable Care Act with steeper declines among people of color compared to Whites, according to a new analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The findings for Hispanics were especially striking.
© 2025 KFF