Drew Altman, PhD

Drew Altman is president and chief executive officer of KFF, a position he has held for more than 30 years since founding the modern day KFF organization in the 1990’s. He is a leading expert on national health policy issues and an innovator in health journalism and the nonprofit field.

Dr. Altman built KFF with the mission the organization pursues today – to serve as an independent source of trusted information on health policy for policymakers, the media, and the public. He is also founding publisher of KFF Health News, the largest health newsroom in the U.S., which reports on health issues and distributes its original journalism through major news outlets across the country. Dr Altman established KFF Health News in 2009 to address the need for in depth journalism focusing on the impact of health policy and the changing health system on people.

Dr. Altman was commissioner of the Department of Human Services for the state of New Jersey, a state umbrella agency which under his leadership was responsible for a third of the state budget and state employees. There he was nationally recognized for initiatives in welfare reform, school based health services, community based  HIV health services, and homelessness. He was director of Health and Human Services at The Pew Charitable Trusts, vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and served in a senior position in the Health Care Financing Administration in the Carter administration. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on numerous nonprofit boards and advisory committees. He has been a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and Axios.

Dr. Altman earned his doctorate in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed his postdoctoral work at Harvard University before moving on to public service. He holds an honorary doctorate from the Morehouse School of Medicine.