Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper, prepared as part of a special issue of Evaluation Review on multi-armed experiments, describes the design of the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, which was carried out from 1974-1981. It pays particular attention to the choice of arms. The paper also describes how the results of the Experiment were used in a simulation model and, looking back, how the design might have differed and how the results apply today, four decades after the Experiment was conducted.