Despite still having the highest rate of overdose deaths, the U.S. and several countries have seen a decrease in overdose ...

Explore our newly updated, enhanced, and expanded International Health Care System Profiles to learn how 31 countries across six continents approach health care. The American public has become ...

Maxine Fuqua, 33 (right), of Wilmar, Ark., is examined by Leia O’Fallon, APRN, with the help of Fuqua’s daughter Kael, 8, during a routine checkup at 29 weeks pregnant at Mainline Health Monticello ...

Disparities in health and health care between racial and ethnic groups do not exist in the abstract. In every U.S. state, differences in access to care, quality of care, or outcomes of care affect ...

For nearly two decades, the Commonwealth Fund has tracked health and health care in each state, seeking both to understand how the policy choices we make affect people’s health outcomes and to ...

Primary care is facing existential challenges — from lower relative investment compared to specialty care to clinician burnout — which are particularly acute in rural communities. 1 For the more than ...

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 ...

Medicare beneficiaries can choose whether to receive their benefits from traditional Medicare or Medicare Advantage plans, which are offered by private insurers. These plans have experienced a surge ...

Consumer choice in health care has been advanced as a pathway for improving the quality and affordability of health care. The idea is that when people have access to full and accurate information ...

When private equity firms buy your local hospital, your primary care doctor’s office, or your local nursing home, they profit. But what happens to those health care institutions, the patients they ...

Causes of Coverage Gaps More than 60 percent of uninsured people are eligible for coverage with some type of subsidy (Exhibit 2). 10 Some enrollment barriers for eligible individuals are policy-driven ...