Hospital Choices, Hospital Prices and Financial Incentives to Physicians / Kate Ho, Ariel Pakes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ho, Kate.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Pakes, Ariel.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w19333.

NBER working paper series no. w19333

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2013.

Summary:

We estimate an insurer-specific preference function which rationalizes hospital referrals for privately-insured births in California. The function is additively separable in: a hospital price paid by the insurer, the distance traveled, and plan and severity-specific hospital fixed effects (capturing hospital quality). We use an inequality estimator that allows for errors in price and detailed hospital-severity interactions and obtain markedly different results than those from a logit. The estimates indicate that insurers with more capitated physicians are more responsive to price. Capitated plans send patients further to utilize similar-quality lower-priced hospitals; but the cost-quality trade-off does not vary with capitation rates.

Notes:

Print version record

August 2013.