Everything you need to know about the Oregon Health Study

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.