Reconciling Seemingly Contradictory Results from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment and the Massachusetts Health Reform

Amanda Kowalski

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2023, vol. 105, issue 3, 646-664

Abstract: A headline result from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment is that emergency room (ER) utilization increased. A seemingly contradictory result from the Massachusetts health reform is that ER utilization decreased. I reconcile both results by identifying treatment effect heterogeneity within the Oregon experiment and extrapolating it to Massachusetts. Even though Oregon compliers increased their ER utilization, they were adversely selected relative to Oregon never takers, who would have decreased their ER utilization. Massachusetts expanded coverage from a higher level to healthier compliers. Therefore, Massachusetts compliers are comparable to a subset of Oregon never takers, which can reconcile the results.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01069
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Reconciling Seemingly Contradictory Results from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment and the Massachusetts Health Reform (2023)
Working Paper: Reconciling Seemingly Contradictory Results from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment and the Massachusetts Health Reform (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:restat:v:105:y:2023:i:3:p:646-664

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().