Explaining KFF

Drew E. Altman, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer. Updated: August 2019 Follow Dr. Altman on Twitter: @DrewAltman

KFF is an endowed, non-profit organization filling the need for trusted, independent information on national health issues. Legally we are a public charity — not a foundation — and as I hope you know, we are an independent national organization, headquartered in San Francisco, without any connection to Kaiser Permanente.

We are an information organization, and we accomplish our mission through policy analysis, polling and survey research, and journalism — the three core components of KFF which enable us to play our national role in health policy. We do two things well, policy and media; there’s a lot in health care we are not the experts on and we leave to others who are.

The hallmark of KFF is our focus on how policy affects people. That is why we focus a great deal on public programs such as the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; these big public programs affect so many people in need. But, we are as concerned about people with private coverage struggling to pay their health care bills as we are about Medicare or Medicaid beneficiaries. And of course we always will have a special focus on the uninsured, who are hit the hardest with both financial and access problems.

We believe in the importance of evidence and facts – these are core values for us – but we also approach our job with respect for diverse views about health policy and more than a little humility about the role we or any one organization can play in our giant health care system. We cannot change what’s broken in the American political system by ourselves, but we can and do try to be a constructive force in it. We are a voice for people and we want to hold both government and the health system accountable for its failures, but we never try to achieve any particular outcome, or take positions or advocate for policies or programs. We want to ensure that debate is informed by credible and timely information — whether it’s an analysis, a poll, or a Kaiser Health News (KHN) story or investigation.

I had an opportunity to come to California, and build the current day organization with this mission in mind, when the board of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation made a decision around 1990 to start over after what were then contentious times at the organization. We established the new mission, recruited staff, developed programs, became an operating foundation, and then later, a public charity, choosing the legal status that fit us best and most honestly represented what we are. Nowadays we simply refer to ourselves as KFF.

We have a Board of Trustees of up to 14 — including myself — with backgrounds in public service, academia, non-profits, health care, and media. They serve two, five-year terms. Ours is a true governing board that exercises ultimate authority over everything at KFF and is very engaged in the organization, but it is not a board involved in program or operations, funding us, or fundraising, as is the case in some non-profits. Our current Chair is the former governor of Wisconsin, Jim Doyle. As a student of these things I can say that no non-profit organization enjoys a healthier partnership between its staff and board, and no board operates more effectively or more democratically. The relationship between the CEO and board at KFF, and the commitment everyone involved with KFF has to our mission, has been an essential ingredient to our success over many years and one of the things that has made this job so enjoyable.

We made a fundamental decision to remain a California-based organization. However, with our core audiences largely in D.C., we have maintained a substantial presence there, constructing a building in 2000 with our Barbara Jordan Conference Center and basing a large staff contingent there as well. We moved our headquarters from the Silicon Valley — where we had long owned a nine-building office complex full of venture capitalists — to San Francisco in 2018, feeling the city would offer a stronger future for our organization. We are thrilled with our new location. We have not changed our name — the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation — even though it can cause occasional confusion because we are neither a foundation, a family foundation, nor are we associated with Kaiser Permanente. We keep the name to honor the legacy of our original benefactor, the great industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, whose motto “find a need and fill it,” we have adapted into our motto: “Filling the need for trusted information on national health issues.” HJK did many things differently, as have we, and we feel a real affinity with him and deeply honor his legacy.

Our expert staff is our principal organizational asset. They conduct the analyses you see us produce, our KFF polls and surveys, and produce the great journalism distributed by KHN. Each part of KFF makes a slightly different contribution to our overall role as an information organization. We try to balance policy debate with facts and new information through our policy analysis, working in real time, or as close to it as we can. We try to give people a voice with our gold-standard polling, maintaining the highest methodological standards in a changing industry. And we try to decode and dissect health policy for that same public through in-depth, creative reporting from KHN.

There are some other dimensions of our work we are very proud of, all of which are also about producing information. For over 20 years we have operated Emmy and Peabody Award-winning, very targeted information campaigns aimed at the groups most at risk of HIV. You can check out the Greater Than AIDS website to learn more. And we have a substantial Global Health Policy Program that mirrors the work we do in domestic health policy. Our newest and fastest-growing program is Kaiser Health News, which I started in 2009. The idea was to establish a non-profit national news service dedicated to in-depth reporting on complex health policy issues, unencumbered by the incentives that sometimes affect commercial news organizations or destination websites. KHN would produce original, in-depth coverage of complex national health issues and bring it to the American people. To do that we built KHN on a distribution — not destination — website model. KHN is a core line item in our operating budget so that it is sustainable, a problem for many non-profit news operations.  It is also editorially independent with regard to story ideas and content, but otherwise operates like all of our other programs with its mission, budget, and personnel decisions controlled centrally. KHN is now the largest health policy newsroom in the country, producing a wide range of journalism for print, radio, and TV, from explanatory stories to features and deep investigations; it is a core part of the KFF information strategy.

Overall, we now support ourselves with about 70% from our endowment and 30% from external funds, which mostly come from foundations, and state and local health departments with whom we partner on Greater Than AIDS. We use external funds chiefly for the incremental costs of vital projects we could not otherwise undertake. We greatly value our funders, without whom we could not do vital work, but maintain full, independent control of everything we do in our funding relationships.

A few years ago we lowered the rate at which we spend from our endowment to about 5.5% annually in order to maintain the real value of our spending power and assets over time. We spent at a much higher rate while we were building a new organization and now want to sustain what we have built. Our operating budget is just north of $42 million a year, which is not big, but adequate for us to do what we need to do with our operating organization style.

That’s us in a nutshell. An information organization trying to play a special role on the national health care scene — with no delusions about how hard that is to do. We keep changing and evolving as an organization and would rather make mistakes then stand pat. Since we operate our own programs, if something isn’t working as planned, we can adapt and fix it.  We love the work, and along the way we have created a family of colleagues who truly enjoy working together and are devoted to our unique mission.