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 analysis examines the competitiveness of markets for hospital care based on the share of metropolitan areas controlled by a small number of independent hospitals or health systems and other measures. It finds that nearly half of metropolitan areas across the country had only one or two hospitals or health systems providing general inpatient hospital care in 2022.
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.
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.
In this JAMA Health Forum column, Larry Levitt highlights how the Make America Healthy Again agenda aimed at chronic disease does little to address the affordability of health care and that efforts to lower federal spending on health care may worsen the problem, raising out-of-pocket costs for many people with Medicaid and Affordable Care Act…
As policymakers and regulators pay more attention to consolidation in health care provider markets, this brief examines and summarizes the evidence about consolidation, including recent trends, the impact on prices and quality, and proposals to address consolidation and increase competition.
This brief describes gaps in data about hospital and health system finances and business practices that limit transparency for policymakers, researchers, and consumers. It examines data issues involving finances, debt collection practices, charity care, prices, ownership, and the 340B Drug Pricing Program.
As the Biden administration begins the process of negotiation drug prices for Medicare as authorized in the Inflation Reduction Act, KFF's Larry Levitt probes some of the arguments against it and the policy and political implications of the debate in this New York Times op-ed column.
This brief explains the role and implications of cross-market mergers between hospitals and health systems that operate in different regions and describes the approaches that government antitrust agencies have taken in reviewing these types of transactions.
Since 2021, federal law has required hospitals to publicly post information about their standard prices and negotiated discount rates for common health services to encourage consumers to compare prices and to promote competition.
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