Peterson-KFF

KFF and the Peterson Center on Healthcare examine market trends contributing to rising health costs and identify several potential federal and state policy issues to watch throughout 2025, including high-cost drugs, federal funding cuts, and workforce shortages.

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.

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.