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.
Health Policy 101 is a comprehensive guide covering fundamental aspects of U.S. health policy and programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, employer-sponsored insurance, the uninsured population, health care costs and affordability, women's health issues, and health care politics. The Public Health chapter examines how public health is governed and delivered in the United States. It includes explanations of key public health frameworks, services, capabilities and characteristics, how the public health system works in state, local and territorial governments, and public health funding, workforce, and communication challenges in an era of declining trust.
As the nation continues to struggle to contain the spread of coronavirus, there is considerable debate about when and how to reopen schools. This analysis finds that one in four teachers (24%, or about 1.47 million people), have a condition that puts them at higher risk of serious illness from coronavirus.
Ebola virus has a unique set of characteristics that determine how and why its spreads, and how deadly it can be. To better understand Ebola, this infographic compares it to twelve other infectious diseases that continue to represent public health challenges today and asks and answers five key questions about the disease.
While to date big cities and major urban areas have seen the greatest number of coronavirus cases and deaths, a new KFF analysis finds the growth rate is now higher in rural areas, where the population tends to be older, younger people are more likely to have high-risk health conditions, and there are fewer intensive-care beds. The analysis finds that in the two-week period ending April 27, non-metro, mostly rural counties saw a 125% increase…
Based on current understanding of risk, forty-one percent of adults ages 18 and older in the U.S. have a higher risk of developing more serious illness if they become infected with the virus that causes COVID-19, because they are older or have serious underlying health conditions, or both, according to a new KFF analysis. Of the more than 105 million adults at higher risk if infected with coronavirus, most – 76.3 million, or 72 percent…
69.4 million adult American workers – approximately four in 10 – are potentially ineligible for emergency paid sick leave benefits. Approximately 25% of those workers (17.7 million workers) are in the health care industry. Seventy-five percent of excluded or exempted workers are women.
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.
On October 10, 2018, the Trump administration released a proposed rule to change “public charge” policies that govern how the use of public benefits may affect individuals’ ability to obtain legal permanent resident (LPR) status. This analysis provides new estimates of the rule’s potential impacts.
States and local governments, rather than the federal government, have authority over school vaccination requirements, and while all 50 states and DC require certain vaccines for school attendance, they vary substantially in how exemptions are granted and administered. As the Trump administration has moved away from longstanding federal childhood vaccine recommendations, an increasing number of states are delinking their vaccine policies from CDC/ACIP guidance, while recent state policy changes have generally made non-medical exemptions easier…
This issue brief provides an update on the latest trends in kindergarten children's routine vaccination and exemption rates. Over three-quarters of states had measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccination rates below the “target” rate of 95% for the 2025-2026 school year.
A comprehensive timeline of public health policy actions by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the Trump administration from 2025-2026, with key dates, descriptions, and impacts.
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