Oregon Health Experiment

5/02/2013 11:45:00 AM
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A few years back, Oregon held a lottery for its Medicaid program, which is a big deal in the world of health economics since it is a rare real-world experiment in which eligibility for Medicaid is assigned randomly, allowing us to do causal inference without the usual confounding endogeneity problems that plague most data. In response to this unique analysis opportunity, a large well-funded team of researchers assembled gobs of data about the applicants for the lottery to assess the impact of expanding Medicaid on a variety of health and financial outcomes. Just recently, that team has completed a follow-up study to see if the results from the initial study still hold up after two years.

I would write a longer post on this, but I find myself essentially agreeing word-for-word with what Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll have already written on this, so I will simply point you to their post here.