TY - JOUR AU - Finkelstein,Amy AU - Taubman,Sarah AU - Wright,Bill AU - Bernstein,Mira AU - Gruber,Jonathan AU - Newhouse,Joseph P. AU - Allen,Heidi AU - Baicker,Katherine AU - Group,The Oregon Health Study TI - The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment: Evidence from the First Year JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 17190 PY - 2011 Y2 - July 2011 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17190 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17190.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Amy Finkelstein Department of Economics MIT E52-383B 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142 Tel: 617/253-4149 Fax: 617/868-2742 E-Mail: afink@mit.edu Sarah Taubman MIT E-Mail: staub@nber.org Bill J. Wright Center for Outcomes Research and Education Providence Health & Services E-Mail: bill.wright@providence.org Mira Bernstein National Bureau of Economic Research E-Mail: mbernst@nber.org Jonathan Gruber MIT Department of Economics E52-355 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142-1347 Tel: 617/253-8892 Fax: 617/253-1330 E-Mail: gruberj@mit.edu Joseph P. Newhouse Division of Health Policy Research and Education Harvard University 180 Longwood Avenue Boston, MA 02115-5899 Tel: 617/432-1325 Fax: 617/432-3503 E-Mail: newhouse@hcp.med.harvard.edu Heidi Allen Center for Outcomes Research and Education Providence Health & Services E-Mail: ha2332@columbia.edu Katherine Baicker Professor of Health Economics Department of Health Policy and Management Harvard School of Public Health 677 Huntington Avenue Boston, MA 02115 E-Mail: kbaicker@hsph.harvard.edu The Oregon Health Study Group includes Matt Carlson (Portland State University), Tina Edlund (Deputy Director, Oregon Health Authority),Charles Gallia (Oregon DHS), Eric Schneider (RAND), and Jeanene Smith (Office for Oregon Health Policy and Research) in addition to the other authors of this paper M2 - featured in NBER digest on 2011-11-01 AB - In 2008, a group of uninsured low-income adults in Oregon was selected by lottery to be given the chance to apply for Medicaid. This lottery provides a unique opportunity to gauge the effects of expanding access to public health insurance on the health care use, financial strain, and health of low-income adults using a randomized controlled design. In the year after random assignment, the treatment group selected by the lottery was about 25 percentage points more likely to have insurance than the control group that was not selected. We find that in this first year, the treatment group had substantively and statistically significantly higher health care utilization (including primary and preventive care as well as hospitalizations), lower out-of-pocket medical expenditures and medical debt (including fewer bills sent to collection), and better self-reported physical and mental health than the control group. ER -