Summary: <p>For decades there was this debate about Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor.</p><p>On one side were people making what seems like the straightforward argument: People who get Medicaid fare better than people who don't.</p><p>On the other side were those making the contrarian argument. They argued that there is already a safety net for the poor and the uninsured, and that Medicaid's reimbursement rates are so low that most doctors don't see Medicaid patients anyway.</p><p>The debate was perennial and unresolvable. You couldn't simply compare people with Medicaid to those without, because the two groups had different characteristics.</p><p>To truly answer the question, you would need to take a big group of people, and randomly divide them into two groups. One group would get Medicaid, and the other wouldn't. But doing that would be unethical.</p><p>Then, a few years back, Oregon announced that it had 10,000 new slots in its Medicaid program. Far more than 10,000 people wanted to enroll. So the state held a lottery.</p><p>The state of Oregon didn't mean to be creating the perfect experiment to test whether Medicaid actually helps people. But that's what it was doing.</p><p><a href="http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/katherine-baicker/" target="_blank">Katherine Baicker</a>, a health economist at Harvard, followed people who entered the Oregon Medicaid lottery — and she compared the outcomes between those who were given Medicaid, and those who were denied.</p><p>On today's show, we talk to her about what she learned — and we hear ger findings mean for the debate over health care in America.</p>
