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This analysis presents key facts about hospitals with more than 40 charts related to national spending on hospital care, characteristics of the hospital industry, rural hospitals, use of hospital care, out-of-pocket spending and medical debt, hospital prices, hospital finances, and charity care.
With the incoming Trump administration and Republican-led Congress looking to ways to reduce federal spending, this Poll finds that the Medicare and Medicaid programs remain broadly popular, and more people favor more spending on those programs than less spending. Among potential actions on health, the public sees price transparency and limiting chemicals in food as top priorities. Few say so about cuts to Medicaid and restrictions on abortion.
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.
It’s quite likely that one of these popular anti-obesity medications will be selected for negotiation in the next round of Medicare’s relatively new drug price negotiation program.
This analysis illustrates the potential total cost of Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, based on their publicly-announced expected prices, once they enter the U.S. commercial market. It compares the average price paid by the federal government for the COVID-19 bivalent boosters to the estimated average commercial prices across different scenarios.
Half of hospitals reported that the cost of providing charity care to patients represented 1.4% or less of their operating expenses in 2020, though the rates vary widely from hospital to hospital, a new KFF analysis finds.
We review several policy options to constrain health care spending, primarily by putting downward pressure on provider prices, including price regulation, global budgets, and spending growth targets.
In September 2023, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a new opportunity for states to leverage federal funding on health care: the Advancing All-Payer Health Equity Approaches and Development (AHEAD) model. With this model, CMS – under the auspices of the CMS Innovation Center, also known as CMMI -- aims to reduce the rate of growth in health care spending, improve people's health, and reduce disparities in health outcomes. This issue brief answers some key questions about the new model and explores considerations for potential state and private participants.
The “No Surprises Act,” which establishes new federal protections against most surprise out-of-network medical bills when a patient receives out-of-network services during an emergency visit or from a provider at an in-network hospital without advance notice, will take effect next month. A new KFF brief outlines what to expect in 2022.
As the Build Back Better Act shifts from the House to the Senate, there’s considerable interest in provisions that would lower the cost of prescription drugs.
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