Healing the Poor: The Influence of Patient Socioeconomic Status on Physician Supply Responses / Alice Chen, Darius N. Lakdawalla.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chen, Alice.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Lakdawalla, Darius N.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w21930.

NBER working paper series no. w21930

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Healing the Poor

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2016.

Summary:

A longstanding literature explores how altruism affects the way physicians respond to incentives and provide care. We analyze how patient socioeconomic status mediates these responses. We show theoretically that patient socioeconomic status systematically influences the way physicians respond to reimbursement changes, and we identify the channels through which these effects operate. We use two Medicare reimbursement changes to investigate these insights empirically. We confirm that a given physician facing an increase in reimbursement boosts utilization by more when treating richer patients. We show that average supply price elasticities vary from 0.02 to 0.18 for a given physician, depending on the patient's socioeconomic status. Finally, we show that the Medicare reforms we study led to overall reimbursement increases that raised healthcare utilization by 10% more for high-income patients compared to their low-income peers.

Notes:

Print version record

January 2016.