Navigating Medicaid: Experimental Evidence on Administrative Burden and Coverage Loss

1We are grateful to J-PAL for funding this project and to Alissa Bazsali for crucial help with implementing the intervention and preparing the data; Krista Bryz-Gornia, Qin Lin, Sara Hernandez, and Alexis Smith provided excellent research and data assistance, and Noreen Giga and Amanda Buechele provided excellent project management assistance. Rebecca Myerson worked at UW-Madison when the research was conducted. We are grateful to Marcella Alsan, Amy Finkelstein, Sumedha Gupta, Jenny Kenny, Tim Layton, Julian Reif, Kosali Simon, Justin Sydnor, Jacob Wallace, Barbara Wolfe, and participants at the Advances with Field Experiments Conference, APPAM, ASHEcon, ASSA, and Midwest Health Economics Conference as well as participants in seminars at Texas A&M University, Baylor University, Georgetown University, Emory University, the University of Georgia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute of Research on Poverty for helpful comments. The authors would like to disclose that Laura Dague is principal investigator of an evaluation of a Medicaid waiver program, and Rebecca Myerson was co-principal investigator of an evaluation of a Medicaid care coordination program, for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services; Allison Espeseth is the director of Covering Wisconsin, which receives funding from Wisconsin Department of Health Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. This RCT was registered as AEARCTR-0009772 (Myerson and Dague 2022). IRB approval was obtained from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Texas A&M University. The Wisconsin Department of Health Services had the right to review the paper prior to its circulation. Required disclaimers: The authors of this article are solely responsible for the content therein. The authors would like to thank the Wisconsin Department of Health Services for the use of data for this analysis, but this agency does not certify the accuracy of the analyses presented. The contents are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement by, CMS/HHS, the U.S. Government, or the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• randomized controlled trials registry entry
• Supplemental Appendix

• August 29, 2025
• February 6, 2026