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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 literature review report summarizes evidence from nearly 200 studies on the effects of Medicaid expansion published between February 2020 and March 2021. These studies generally find beneficial impacts of expansion across a range of areas.
KHN and Gray Television’s InvestigateTV team joined forces to dig into the underlying reasons why strokes are a deadlier threat across most counties in Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, rural regions that are characterized by high rates of poverty, vulnerable elderly populations, a shortage of medical providers and an epidemic of local hospital closures. They found that large shares of the regions’ residents live more than 45 minutes from a hospital that is stroke-certified and…
This analysis examines list prices for COVID-19 testing at the largest hospitals in every state and finds they range widely from $20 to $850. Federal law now requires private insurers to cover COVID-19 tests at no cost to the patient and provides funding for people without health insurance.
In spite of a new price transparency rule that requires hospitals to publish the prices of common health services, comparing prices across hospitals remains challenging due to limited compliance with the law and a lack of standardization in the available data, a new KFF analysis finds. The federal rule, which went into effect on January 1, 2021, aims to lift the veil on how much health plans pay hospitals for health services. To be compliant,…
A new issue brief examines compliance with a new federal price transparency rule and variation in payer-negotiated rates at U.S. hospitals. The analysis looks at the websites of the two largest hospitals in each state and the District of Columbia, and finds that a lack of consistency in the data and limited compliance among the hospitals sampled makes it difficult to compare prices across facilities. The brief is available on the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker,…
The News Leaders Association (NLA) awarded KFF’s Kaiser Health News (KHN) and Guardian US the 2021 Batten Medal for Coverage of the Coronavirus Pandemic for their year-long “Lost on the Frontline” investigation documenting the lives of more than 3,600 health care workers in the U.S. who died of COVID-19 after contracting the disease on the job. The project honored their lives and asked, “Did so many have to die?” by investigating the circumstances of their…
Admissions to hospitals for reasons other than COVID-19 fell markedly again in November as cases of infections with the novel coronavirus began to surge anew, suggesting that more people were delaying care due to the worsening pandemic, according to an updated analysis by Epic Health Research Network (EHRN) and KFF. The recent decline follows a big drop in overall admissions nationally last spring after the onset of the pandemic, which was followed by a rebound…
This brief shows trends in hospital admissions during the coronavirus pandemic. Admissions to hospitals for reasons other than COVID-19 fell markedly again in November 2020 as cases of infections with the novel coronavirus began to surge anew, suggesting that more people were delaying care due to the worsening pandemic.
This summarizes key provisions of the No Surprises Act, enacted in December 2020 to address the problem of unexpected medical bills, and issues that could arise during implementation ahead of its Jan. 1, 2022 effective date.
A new KFF analysis examines how new federal rules on price transparency for health services may affect patient decision-making and market pricing. As of January 1, 2021, the United States Department of Health and Human Services requires that hospitals publish payer-negotiated rates for common services on their websites. A second set of rules, which requires insurers to provide rate and cost-sharing estimates for common services, is scheduled to go into effect in 2023. While the…
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