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.
This Visualizing Health Policy infographic examines state policies related to abortion and their intersection with clinical practice. Nine of 10 reported abortions in the United States are in the first trimester. Between 2003 and 2012, the abortion rate decreased 18% among women aged 15 to 44 years.
This perspective highlights the important relationship between medicine and trust in news media and articulates three ways that clinicians, health care organizations, and journalists might begin to rebuild the foundation of trust on which both medicine and journalism rely. Co-authored by KFF's David Rousseau, Vineet M. Arora of University of Chicago Medicine, and Gary Schwitzer of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, it appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
This brief survey examines how the public views the motivations of doctors, nurses, insurance companies, and drug companies when it comes to making profits vs. working for the public good. It updates a question asked in 2005 to measure how views have changed over time.
Compared to most similarly large and wealthy countries, the U.S. has fewer practicing physicians per capita but has a similar number of licensed nurses per capita. Looking specifically at the hospital setting, the U.S. has more hospital-based employees per capita than most other comparable countries, but nearly half of these hospital workers are non-clinical staff.
This brief provides the most recent data on the extent to which non-pediatric physicians are opting out of Medicare, by specialty and by state.
This brief examines the share of non-pediatric office-based physicians accepting new patients with Medicare or private insurance and how these rates have changed over time and vary by physician specialties, geographic areas, and physician and practice characteristics across Medicare and private insurance. This analysis further examines the extent to which non-pediatric physicians are opting out of Medicare, by specialty and state.
A new KFF interactive provides essential facts and trends about spending on Medicare, the federal health insurance program that covers 65 million seniors and people with disabilities, or nearly 1 in 5 Americans. In 2020, Medicare spending accounted for 12 percent of the federal budget and 20 percent of national health care spending.
This brief explains the role of federal and state antitrust agencies in challenging anticompetitive practices among hospitals and other health care providers, including the legal authority of federal and state agencies, the role that they play in enforcing antitrust laws, and proposed options for strengthening their authority.
In this column, KFF President and CEO Drew Altman explores the state of consumer protections in health care and explains why, even with consumer frustration clear, Congress is unlikely to pursue major new health insurance protections but there could be some modest steps.
The new health reform law poses questions about how the increase in the insured population will affect the demand on the health care workforce.
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