So often, when we implement new policy, I wish we had better ways to capture its effects so that we could expand our knowledge base as to how decisions change health and health care. The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, and its older brother the RAND HIE, were RCTs designed to look at how insurance affected utilization and health. While these were impressive studies, they had their flaws.
RCTs are hard to do, though; they’re also expensive. Sometimes, other designs are necessary. Recently, in Annals of Internal Medicine, Laura Wherry and Sarah Miller looked at how the Medicaid expansion has changed things. Let’s discuss. This is Healthcare Triage News.
This was adapted from a post I wrote for AcademyHealth.
