title:         A 'Politically Robust' Experimental Design for Public Policy Evaluation, with Application to the Mexican Universal Health Insurance Program
authors:       Gary King, Emmanuela Gakidou, Nirmala Ravishankar, Ryan Moore, Jason Lakin, Manett Vargas, Martha María Téllez-Rojo, Juan Eugenio Hernández Avila, Mauricio Hernández Avila, Héctor Hernández Llamas
entrydate:     2006-09-05 18:45:46
keywords:
abstract:      We develop an approach to conducting large scale randomized public policy experiments intended to be more robust to the political interventions that have ruined some or all parts of many similar previous efforts. Under our proposed design, the benefits of random assignment would remain even if we lose observations; our inferences can still be unbiased even if politics disrupts two of the three steps in our analytical procedures; and other empirical checks are available to validate the overall design. We illustrate with a design and empirical validation of a planned evaluation of the Mexican Seguro Popular de Salud (Universal Health Insurance) program. Seguro Popular, which is intended to grow to provide medical care, drugs, preventative services, and financial health protection to the 50 million Mexicans without health insurance, is one of the largest health reforms of any country in the last two decades. The evaluation is also large scale, constituting one of the largest policy experiments to date and what may be the largest randomized health policy experiment ever.

http://polmeth.wustl.edu/retrieve.php?id=638

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