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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 perspective provides additional information on state plans related to the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) primary care rate increase after the 100% federal financing ends December 31, 2014. The data in this report were collected as part of KCMU’s Annual Medicaid Budget Survey, conducted by Health Management Associates with the support of the National Association of Medicaid Directors,
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 study, published in a Health Affairs Web exclusive, provides the first national and state-by-state update of Medicaid physician fees since 2003. Medicaid has historically reimbursed physicians under fee-for-service at levels below what Medicare and private health insurers would pay for the same services. The study finds that Medicaid fees grew by more than 15 percent from 2003 to 2008, but fell in real terms because the gains did not keep pace with inflation. Medicaid…
This brief examines key facts around proposals to align Medicare payments for outpatient services across care settings, otherwise known as “site-neutral payment reforms.”
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 policy watch discusses the implications for the U.S. health care workforce of the recent DOS immigrant visa pause for individuals from 75 countries deemed more likely to be a public charge.
This brief examines Black women's experiences in health care, including unfair treatment by providers due to race and their health outcomes as a result of this treatment. The brief also explores the association between racially concordant providers and positive health care experiences among Black women.
This analysis uses 2022 data from the American Hospital Association (AHA) Annual Survey Database to present the number and share of hospital workers by occupation who may not be covered by the federal protections against non-compete agreements because they work for a non-profit hospital.
A new analysis and chart collection finds that the U.S. has fewer hospital beds and practicing physicians per capita than many similarly large and wealthy countries with health care systems already strained by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Compared to Italy and Spain, two countries in which hospitals have already been overwhelmed by an influx of COVID-19 patients, the U.S. has fewer practicing physicians per capita - 2.6 per 1,000 people, compared to 4.0 in Italy…
This analysis for the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker uses claims data from private, large employer-based plan to examine trends in complexity coding across outpatient practice settings from 2004 to 2021. It finds a trend toward higher complexity codes that contributes to higher outpatient spending.
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