The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment: Evidence from the First Year
Name
Finkelstein_The Oregon.pdf
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483.15 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Taubman, Sarah
Wright, Bill
Bernstein, Mira
Newhouse, Joseph P.
Allen, Heidi L.
Baicker, Katherine
Gruber, Jonathan
Finkelstein, Amy
Date Issued
May 2012
Journal
Quarterly Journal of Economics
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Citation
Finkelstein, A. et al. “The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment: Evidence from the First Year +.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2012): n. pag. Web. 1 June 2012.
Version
Author's final manuscript
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 an 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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjs020
