The Town with no Poverty: Using Health Administration Data to Assess Outcomes of a North American Guaranteed Annual Income Field Experiment

We took advantage of an historical accident to re-examine the impact of a Guaranteed Annual Income in a small town which served as the only saturation site in the five North American Negative Income Tax field experiments of the 1970s. Because universal health insurance was introduced in this jurisdiction just before the MINCOME experiment, we were able to access health administration data to determine whether the quality of life of a community might be affected by a Guaranteed Annual Income. We used a quasi-experimental design to determine whether contacts with the health care system declined among subjects who lived in the experimental community relative to a comparison group matched by age, sex, geography, family type and family size during the MINCOME experiment. We found that overall hospitalizations, and specifically hospitalizations for accidents and injuries and mental health diagnoses, declined for MINCOME subjects relative to the comparison group. Physician contacts for mental health diagnoses fell for subjects relative to comparators. We were unable to substantiate claims from US research that showed increases in fertility rates among subjects relative to controls, improved neonatal outcomes, or increased family dissolution rates. These results would seem to suggest that a Guaranteed Annual Income, implemented broadly in society, may improve health and social outcomes at the community level.