Amazing Fact! Science Proves Health Insurance Works: Ezra Klein

July 7 (Bloomberg) -- In 2002, about 110,000 people wereenrolled in Oregon’s Medicaid program. By 2008, budget cuts hadreduced that number to 19,000. In fact, so many people weredriven out that the state realized it had the money to cover10,000 more residents. In the interest of fairness, officialsset up a lottery -- and, quite accidentally, kicked off the mostimportant health-care policy experiment since the 1970s.

The gold standard in research is a study that randomlychooses who gets a new treatment and who doesn’t. That way, youknow your results are unaffected by differences in the twopopulations you are studying. That’s hard to do with health-careinsurance: Are you going to randomly refuse to give peopleaccess to medical care just to see how much worse than theinsured they fare? Is that even ethical?