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 .
Consequences of cost-sharing for children's health.
Do children whose families bear a percentage of their health care costs reduce their use of ambulatory care compared with those families who receive free care ? If so , does the reduction affect their health ? To answer these questions , 1,844 children aged 0 to 13 years were r and omly assigned ( for a period of 3 or 5 years ) to one of 14 insurance plans . The plans differed in the percentage of their medical bills that families paid . One plan provided free care . The others required up to 95 % coinsurance subject to a + 1,000 maximum . Children whose families paid a percentage of costs reduced use by up to one third . For the typical child in the study , this reduction caused no significant difference in either parental perceptions of their child 's health or in physiologic measures of health . Confidence intervals are sufficiently narrow for most measures to rule out the possibility that large true differences went undetected . Nor were statistically significant differences observed for children at risk of disease . Wider confidence intervals for these comparisons , however , mean that clinical ly meaningful differences , if present , could have been undetected in certain subgroups
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 .