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.
State Health Facts is a KFF project that provides free, up-to-date, and easy-to-use health data for all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the United States. It offers data on specific types of health insurance coverage, including employer-sponsored, Medicaid, Medicare, as well as people who are uninsured by demographic characteristics, including age, race/ethnicity, work status, gender, and income. There are also data on health insurance status for a state's population overall and broken down by age, gender, and income.
This brief reviews the issues and the evidence underpinning five broad areas of policy initiatives that flow from recommendations made in the Institute of Medicine's 2002 report, Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Care. Issue Brief (.pdf)
The nation’s safety net financing is fragmented; consequently, providers must knit together resources from many different funding sources to create a stream of revenue to cover the costs of providing a very broad range of services. This report describes those sources of revenue, documenting that nearly 40% of all safety net revenues are from Medicaid. The report also describes challenges that safety net hospitals and health systems are experiencing as they attempt to rebound from…
Report - Women and Health Care: A National Profile Women and Health Care: A National Profile is a nationally representative telephone survey of 2,766 women ages 18 and older. A shorter companion survey of 507 men was also conducted. Full Report (.pdf) Report Highlights (.pdf) Introduction and Methods (.pdf) Chapter 1: The Demographics of Women (.pdf) Chapter 2: The Health of Women (.pdf) Chapter 3: Women and Health Insurance Coverage (.pdf) Chapter 4: Women's Access…
This study examines the privately insured who have had problems paying medical bills and compares their access to care to those who have not had medical bill problems as well as those with no health coverage at all, using a national representative survey of adults. The study finds that care-seeking patterns among those with private coverage but having problems paying their medical bills resembled those of the uninsured. Executive Summary (.pdf) Report (.pdf)
The appropriate level of cost-sharing for patients remains a key issue in designing both private and public health insurance. This report reviews the groundbreaking RAND Health Insurance Experiment from the 1970s to offer insights into current policy debates about appropriate cost-sharing levels. One of the most ambitious health policy studies in U.S. history, the RAND experiment randomly assigned thousands of families to insurance with varying levels of patient co-insurance. The researchers followed the participants for…
USA Today/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health National Survey of Households Affected by Cancer This USA Today/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health National Survey provides an in-depth examination of how families cope with cancer and highlights problems of health insurance and health care costs through the lens of those who have experienced this major illness. The survey shows the disease’s devastating impact often extends beyond an individual patient to affect entire families…
Health Coverage For Low-Income Children This fact sheet profiles the low-income children population, describes sources of health insurance coverage for the population, and summarizes trends and issues about their health coverage. Fact Sheet (.pdf)
A new study commissioned by the Kaiser Family Foundation and authored by Dr. Jack Hadley of The Urban Institute and featured in the March 14, 2007, Journal of the American Medical Association theme issue on Access to Care documents that people who are uninsured receive less care and have worse outcomes following an accident or the onset of a new chronic condition than those with insurance. The study -- based on analysis of eight years…
Will there be a big debate about health reform in the general election? If there is it will elevate the issue further, engage the public, and create momentum and a mandate for action by a new President and Congress. If, however, the debate about health is tepid or health is eclipsed by other issues such as the economy and Iraq, momentum could falter. One measure of the level of debate will be whether or not…
This policy brief examines the underlying shifts in health insurance coverage in 2007, which resulted in a 1.5 million decrease in the number of uninsured people under age 65, due to increased public coverage. This includes about 300,000 in Massachusetts, which implemented its comprehensive health reform that year. The brief also projects that the current economic downturn and rising unemployment rate likely will cause the number of uninsured to grow by at least 2 million…
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