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:
“If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself.... If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“I conceive that the leading characteristic of the nineteenth century has been the rapid growth of the scientific spirit, the consequent application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems with which the human mind is occupied, and the correlative rejection of traditional beliefs which have proved their incompetence to bear such investigation.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel—”Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.””
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)