Designing Hospital Antitrust Policy to Promote Social Welfare / Daniel Kessler, Mark McClellan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kessler, Daniel.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

McClellan, Mark.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w6897.

NBER working paper series no. w6897

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hospital care--Evaluation.

Hospital care.

Medical economics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 1999.

Cambridge, Mass. : National Bureau of Economic Research, 1999.

Summary:

Applying principles of merger evaluation to the health care industry in general, and to hospital markets in particular, poses several unique challenges. Definition of relevant geographic markets and assessment of the consequences of changes in competition for patient and social welfare are complicated by asymmetric information and moral hazard due to health insurance. We suggest a new empirical approach to assessing the impact of hospital competition which addresses the shortcomings of existing methods. We then summarize our main results on the welfare consequences of competition. We conclude with an illustration of how our methods can be used to assess the welfare implications of specific hospital mergers, and with some implications of our findings for antitrust policy.

Notes:

Print version record

January 1999.