5.8.2013 | by: The health policy community has been abuzz with
this question over the past few days, ever since a Harvard
research team released a new round of results from a landmark
study of Medicaid in Oregon. The study stands apart because it
included a technique you may have learned about in Science 101:
having a control group. Researchers have always struggled with
measuring how people with health insurance fare compared to a
similar group without health insurance. In other words, how can
you ethically offer health insurance to one group of people and
not offer it to another in order to measure the results? A
policy decision in Oregon provided an opportunity to do this
very thing. A few years ago, Oregon decided to expand Medicaid
to low-income adults who hadn’t been eligible before, but the
state didn’t have enough funding to cover all of them. So,
Oregon set up a lottery in which 30,000 people were randomly
selected from a Medicaid waiting list of 90,000. The lottery
allowed researchers to study how e