This brief provides an overview of the current state of freestanding birth center care in the U.S. using available data.

Insurers increased premiums by more than 20 percent; the average “benchmark” premium before tax credits jumped from $497 per ...

Eighty-five percent of all U.S. health care spending goes toward managing chronic diseases connected to poor diet and nutrition. Yet most doctors receive little to no meaningful training in nutrition.

Read full profiles of international health systems describing the role of government, how systems are organized and financed, who and what is covered, and what is being done to ensure quality of care, ...

Health insurance is essential for getting timely care. In the United States, however, health coverage is fragmented, difficult to navigate, and unaffordable for many. About half of Americans have ...

We believe everyone should be able to get the effective, affordable care they need to maintain and improve their health. Focusing on people who have low incomes and those who are medically underserved ...

Please take a moment to answer this six-question survey to help us improve the States in Action newsletter. We appreciate and welcome your feedback. Summary: With pay-for-performance (P4P) programs ...

In North Dakota, references to the Rough Riders — a famed cavalry in the 1898 Spanish-American War — abound. The name graces hotels, grocery stores, and golf tournaments and has become a shorthand ...

The article is part of a partnership between the Commonwealth Fund and the Bassett Research Institute in Cooperstown, N.Y., to explore innovative approaches to the health care challenges facing rural ...

In Exhibit 2, we measure spending as a percentage of household income rather than dollars (see Appendix 2 for further discussion of this metric). People in the highest quintile of spending as a ...

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 ...

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 ...