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.
This analysis examines the reported experiences among self-identified LGBT individuals based two months of KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor reports and finds that LGBT people have experienced the COVID-19 pandemic differently than non-LGBT people, including being harder hit in some areas.
This policy watch piece highlights the potential challenges surrounding COVID-19 vaccinations among Hispanic people, whose health and finances have been extremely hard hit by the pandemic. Low rates of vaccination among Hispanic people would leave them at increased risk for the virus, could further widen existing health disparities, and would leave gaps that hinder our ability to achieve overall population immunity.
These slides compare COVID-19 coronavirus cases and deaths in rural and urban areas.
At-home SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic tests may be a promising avenue to get more people tested in a timely manner. Lessons from at-home sexually transmitted tests can offer important less about limitations related to specimen collection, public health surveillance, and coverage and access.
In response to the need to increase access to testing during the COVID-19 pandemic, recent federal legislation, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, amended by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, creates a new optional Medicaid eligibility pathway, with 100% federal matching funds, for states to cover coronavirus testing and testing-related services for uninsured individuals. This new option is available from March 18, 2020 through the end of the public health emergency period. This issue brief answers key questions about how the new eligibility pathway is being implemented, drawing on frequently asked questions issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Recent federal legislation, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, amended by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, authorizes a 6.2 percentage point increase in federal Medicaid matching funds to help states respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. This issue brief answers key questions about the new federal funds, drawing on two sets of frequently asked questions about the Families First Coronavirus Response Act and CARES Act issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
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.
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.
Rates of long COVID have begun to flatten. About 1 in 10 adults with COVID have reported having long COVID since rates fell in 2023, according to a KFF analysis of the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The U.S. has by far the highest homicide by firearm rate among similarly large and wealthy countries, including among children and teens.
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