Harvard University - Department of Health Policy & Management; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Date Written: July 2011
Abstract
In 2008, a group of uninsured low-income adults in Oregon was selected by lottery to be given the chance to apply for Medicaid. This lottery provides a unique opportunity to gauge the effects of expanding access to public health insurance on the health care use, financial strain, and health of low-income adults using a randomized controlled design. In the year after random assignment, the treatment group selected by the lottery was about 25 percentage points more likely to have insurance than the control group that was not selected. We find that in this first year, the treatment group had substantively and statistically significantly higher health care utilization (including primary and preventive care as well as hospitalizations), lower out-of-pocket medical expenditures and medical debt (including fewer bills sent to collection), and better self-reported physical and mental health than the control group.
Finkelstein, afink@mit.edu and Finkelstein, Amy and Taubman, Sarah and Wright, Bill and Bernstein, Mira and Gruber, Jonathan and Newhouse, Joseph P. and Allen, Heidi and Baicker, Katherine, The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment: Evidence from the First Year (July 2011). NBER Working Paper No. w17190, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1881018
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