Our comprehensive review and meta- analysis of these experiments find suggestive evidence of health benefits associated with investments in early life , income support , and health insurance interventions .
Housing and neighborhood trials had no effect on the outcomes included in the meta-analyses .
A positive effect of the trial on its primary socioeconomic outcome was associated with higher odds of reporting health improvements .
Early life , income , and health insurance interventions have the potential to improve health .
Policy Points Social policies might not only improve economic well-being , but also health .
Health policy experts have therefore advocated for investments in social policies both to improve population health and potentially reduce health system costs .
Since the 1960s , a large number of social policies have been experimentally evaluated in the United States .
Some of these experiments include health outcomes , providing a unique opportunity to inform evidence -based policymaking .
CONTEXT Insurers and health care providers are investing heavily in nonmedical social interventions in an effort to improve health and potentially reduce health care costs .
Does free care improve adults' health? Results from a randomized controlled trial.
Does free medical care lead to better health than insurance plans that require the patient to shoulder part of the cost ? In an effort to answer this question , we studied 3958 people between the ages of 14 and 61 who were free of disability that precluded work and had been r and omly assigned to a set of insurance plans for three or five years . One plan provided free care ; the others required enrollees to pay a share of their medical bills . As previously reported , patients in the latter group made approximately one-third fewer visits to a physician and were hospitalized about one-third less often . For persons with poor vision and for low-income persons with high blood pressure , free care brought an improvement ( vision better by 0.2 Snellen lines , diastolic blood pressure lower by 3 mm Hg ) ; better control of blood pressure reduced the calculated risk of early death among those at high risk . For the average participant , as well as for subgroups differing in income and initial health status , no significant effects were detected on eight other measures of health status and health habits . Confidence intervals for these eight measures were sufficiently narrow to rule out all but a minimal influence , favorable or adverse , of free care for the average participant . For some measures of health in subgroups of the population , however , the broader confidence intervals make this conclusion less certain
Our comprehensive review and meta- analysis of these experiments find suggestive evidence of health benefits associated with investments in early life , income support , and health insurance interventions .
Housing and neighborhood trials had no effect on the outcomes included in the meta-analyses .
A positive effect of the trial on its primary socioeconomic outcome was associated with higher odds of reporting health improvements .
Early life , income , and health insurance interventions have the potential to improve health .
Policy Points Social policies might not only improve economic well-being , but also health .
Health policy experts have therefore advocated for investments in social policies both to improve population health and potentially reduce health system costs .
Since the 1960s , a large number of social policies have been experimentally evaluated in the United States .
Some of these experiments include health outcomes , providing a unique opportunity to inform evidence -based policymaking .
CONTEXT Insurers and health care providers are investing heavily in nonmedical social interventions in an effort to improve health and potentially reduce health care costs .