Today’s Managing Health Care Costs Indicator is 89,824 Click to enlarge. Source Oregon realized it had resources to add about 10,000 beneficiaries to the Medicaid roles in 2008, and decided to hold a lottery to determine who would be awarded this Medicaid insurance. 89,824 Oregonians were eligible, 29.664 were randomized to be able to apply for Medicaid, and about 1/3 actually qualified. (Reasons for not qualifying included not completing the paperwork or having income that was too high.). Researchers at Harvard used this natural experiment to see what the impact of winning this Medicaid lottery really meant. This natural experiment is ideal to determine the effect of gaining potential Medicaid eligibility – because the 30,000 who won the lottery (experimental group) were randomly chosen, making it unlikely that they were significantly different than those who did not win the lottery (control group). This i...