In today’s “Wonkbook,” Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas discuss the success of the Oregon Medicaid experiment, which they note is the first randomized-controlled trial on Medicaid coverage. For the experiment, Oregon held a lottery among low-income adults in 2008 to expand Medicaid coverage to 10,000 residents, and then compared this group with a similar group of adults without health coverage. Klein and Soltas write that the successful experiment was a “sad accident” because of its design and note that if more federal dollars were spent “to figure out which policies work and which don’t, we’d quickly amass a huge storehouse of evidence that could help us spend every other dollar in the budget more effectively.” Klein and Soltas highlight a recent Hamilton Project and Results for America proposal by Harvard Kennedy School’s Jeffrey Liebman, “Building on Recent Advances in Evidence-Based Policymaking,” which proposes reforming government funding practices to reward innovation and evidence. To read the full piece, click here.