This issue of Transforming Care looks at how employees of health care systems are working to make AI useful while also ...

Explore comparative data on key health system characteristics and performance indicators such as overall health care spending, hospital spending and utilization, health care access, and more.

This brief was originally published in December 2020 and updated in July 2025. In 2023, at a time when maternal mortality was declining worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the ...

The main purpose of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to make health coverage affordable and available to all Americans, with the goal of near-universal coverage. To build on existing coverage (namely ...

People’s health also varies markedly across and within states, as does access to health services and overall quality of care. 5 Large racial and ethnic health inequities, driven by factors both inside ...

An estimated 26 million Americans, or 8 percent of the U.S. population, lacked health insurance in 2023. 1 While the United States still lags countries that have universal coverage, today’s uninsured ...

Why a State Medicare Scorecard? Medicare, established 60 years ago, provides health care coverage for more than 68 million Americans, including nearly all adults age 65 and older as well as 7 million ...

Issue: The Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act (H.R. 3) promises a fundamental shift in efforts to lower the cost of prescription drugs in the United States. A key provision is a requirement ...

Medicaid operates alongside a number of federal grant programs that directly support “safety net” health care providers. The best-known programs are community health centers, the Ryan White CARE Act, ...

Meaningful improvements to how health care is organized, paid for, and delivered are not only needed but possible. The Commonwealth Fund’s 18-member Task Force on Payment and Delivery System Reform ...

Primary care providers (PCPs) serve as most people’s first point of contact with the health care system. These clinicians build relationships with their patients over time and help coordinate care ...

But maternal mortality is only the tip of the iceberg. Rates of severe maternal morbidity (SMM), which includes unexpected, life-threatening outcomes (often called “near deaths”), are also rising. The ...