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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
The Health Insurance Experiment (HIE) was designed at RAND in the 1970s as one of the large-scale national public policy social experiments that could help to improve legislation. The HIE examined how different levels and types of health insurance proposals could impact health care expenditures and health status. In those years, we introduced the FSM as a new method for randomly assigning families to about 13 distinct health insurance plans (treatments). Relative to stratified random sampling, the FSM was seen back then to produce noticeably better balanced and more efficient samples for the treatments, with respect to the joint distributions of numerous (over 20) pre-experimental covariates that predict health utilization. The seminar at LANL will describe FSM's concepts and techniques that could deserve wider application in real experimental designs, and it compares and illustrates FSM's performance in relatively simple settings with certain other widely-used procedures. The work is part of an ongoing project at Harvard, jointly with Ambarish Chattopadhyay, PhD student, Statistics Department, and Assistant Professor Jose Zubizarreta, Health Care Policy Department.
Host: Sarah Michalak