Drew Altman, the founding president and chief executive of KFF, who helped shape the organization into one of the nation’s most influential nonprofit health policy sources, told his staff on Wednesday that he would retire at the end of the year.
Dr. Altman, 75, has worked at KFF since 1990. It was formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation.
He will be replaced by two senior KFF executives, Larry Levitt, 63, who will serve as chief executive, and Mollyann Brodie, 59, who will serve as president.
Under Dr. Altman’s tenure, KFF has become a primary supplier of information and data on many of the most fiercely debated topics in health care, including the Affordable Care Act, vaccines and gender-affirming care.
While other organizations might shy away from controversial issues, “he put the foundation directly into the eye of the storm,” said Gerry Rosberg, a former Columbia University senior administrator who was a former board director.
What distinguishes KFF from many of its philanthropic peers is its decision to remain neutral on the health care issues it analyzes, Mr. Rosberg said.
“There never has been a KFF plan for reform or anything else,” Dr. Altman said.
“We believe that our impact as an organization comes from the role we have decided to play as an honest purveyor of the best analysis and facts we can possibly produce,” he said. “We really do stick to that.”
KFF receives no money from federal or state governments, corporations or industry groups. “We don’t have stakeholders,” Dr. Altman said. “We don’t have allies.”
Now a public charity, based in San Francisco, KFF has an annual operating budget — at $76 million — that is funded mostly from its endowment and supplemented by foundations and one individual, MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The organization employs about 250 people.
KFF also regularly conducts public opinion polls on health care issues and operates an independent newsroom with a staff of about 120 people. All of the information it produces is available free of charge on its website.
“KFF is the most trusted and respected voice in health policy, in large part because of Drew Altman and his vision and leadership,” said former Senator Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican who is the chair of KFF’s board of trustees, in a statement.
Senator Snowe said the board had identified Mr. Levitt and Dr. Brodie as best suited to succeed Dr. Altman.
“We’ve been at KFF nearly three decades each,” Mr. Levitt said. “We’ve been side by side with Drew building what KFF is now.”
“We’re going to stay laser-focused on our mission and our audiences,” Dr. Brodie said.
A former state health official from New Jersey, Dr. Altman took over the organization when it was a small family foundation created by the industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. He converted it into a public charity. In 2009, he added KFF Health News, the organization’s newsroom.
In 2023, the organization changed its name from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation to KFF, partly to avoid confusion with the large California health system, Kaiser Permanente.
KFF is considered a reliable source of information at a time when there is so much division over health policy in the United States, and when much of the discussion can be colored by partisan views.
“We’re in the fact-based information business when much of the world is not,” Mr. Levitt said.
Reed Abelson covers the business of health care, focusing on how financial incentives are affecting the delivery of care, from the costs to consumers to the profits to providers.
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