Methods
The RAND HIE was begun in 1971 by a group led by health economist Joseph Newhouse and including health service researchers Robert Brook and John Ware; health economists Willard Manning, Emmett Keeler, Arleen Leibowitz, and Susan Marquis; and statisticians Carl Morris and Naihua Duan. The group set out to answer this question (among others): "Does free medical care lead to better health than insurance plans that require the patient to shoulder part of the cost?".
The team established an insurance company using funding from the then-United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The company randomly assigned 5809 people to insurance plans that either had no cost-sharing, 25%, 50% or 95% coinsurance rates with a maximum annual payment of $1000. It also randomly assigned 1,149 persons to a staff model health maintenance organization (HMO), the Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound. That group faced no cost sharing and was compared with those in the fee-for-service system with no cost sharing as well as an additional 733 members of the Cooperative who were already enrolled in it.
Read more about this topic: RAND Health Insurance Experiment
Famous quotes containing the word methods:
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Henry George (1839–1897)
“The comparison between Coleridge and Johnson is obvious in so far as each held sway chiefly by the power of his tongue. The difference between their methods is so marked that it is tempting, but also unnecessary, to judge one to be inferior to the other. Johnson was robust, combative, and concrete; Coleridge was the opposite. The contrast was perhaps in his mind when he said of Johnson: “his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced.””
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)