The Kaiser Family Foundation

The Kaiser Family Foundation

The Kaiser Family Foundation was established in 1991 by Henry J. Kaiser's legacy, but it is not a grantmaking foundation in the traditional sense. Under founding CEO Drew Altman, the organization deliberately shed its hospital-system roots to become an operating foundation focused entirely on health policy analysis, polling, and journalism. Its principal product is trusted data: the monthly Medicaid enrollment tracker, the annual Employer Health Benefits Survey, and the uninsured rate estimates that Congress, the White House, and the Congressional Budget Office rely on for baseline scoring. The Foundation does not fund the Kaiser Permanente health system, a structural separation finalized in the foundation's early years and now fundamental to its operational independence from any healthcare delivery or insurance entity. KFF deploys its roughly $600 million endowment not through grants but through in-house research and communications. The organization operates as a hybrid think tank and newsroom, producing the Kaiser Health News (KHN) wire service, which reaches millions through syndication partners including NPR, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Its analytic teams cover the full span of domestic health policy: Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, employer-sponsored insurance, global health, and racial health disparities. A dedicated polling unit conducts monthly tracking surveys that shape political coverage of healthcare, while the Program on Medicare Policy provides the technical briefs that Congressional staff use to draft legislation. Geographic reach is nationwide with a concentration on federal policy from the Washington, DC office and state-level tracking across all fifty states. KFF is led by President and CEO Drew Altman, a former commissioner of human services in New Jersey and a senior official in the Carter and Reagan-era Health Care Financing Administration. The organization maintains approximately 200 professionals across its San Francisco headquarters and Washington, DC policy bureau. Founded with a bequest from Kaiser Industries, the foundation's endowment structure ensures it operates free from both government funding and commercial health-sector donors. It does not maintain a venture arm, fellowship program, or co-investment club. In February 2024, KFF announced the acquisition of the nonprofit health news site Health Newsroom, folding it into its Kaiser Health News broadcast and digital reporting operation (per The New York Times, February 2024). What structurally differentiates KFF from peer foundations is its deliberate refusal to issue grants to external organizations. While endowed health philanthropies like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation or the Commonwealth Fund primarily fund external research, KFF retains all research, polling, and news production inside its own walls. This makes it an operating foundation — a legal designation it shares with only a handful of nationally significant institutions — and grants its analytic products an unusual direct line to policy without the principal-agent problem that clouds grant-funded research. Its editorial independence from Kaiser Permanente, codified in its 1990s name and governance separation, remains the single most defining and audited feature of its architecture.