NBER Working Papers by Christopher Afendulis

Health care providers may vertically integrate not only to facilitate coordination of care, but also for strategic reasons that may not be in patients' best interests. Optimal Medicare reimbursement policy depends upon the extent to which each of these explanations is correct. To investigate, we compare the consequences of the 1997 adoption of prospective payment for skilled nursing facilities (SNF PPS) in geographic areas with high versus low levels of hospital/SNF integration. We find that SNF PPS decreased spending more in high integration areas, with no measurable consequences for patient health outcomes. Our findings suggest that subjecting integrated providers to higher-powered reimbursement incentives, i.e., less cost-sharing, may enhance medical productivity. More generally, w...

What are the important tradeoffs in consulting a single expert for both diagnosis and treatment? On one hand, an integrated diagnostician may have the incentive to recommend treatments that are not in the buyer's best interests. On the other hand, joint production of diagnosis and treatment by an integrated diagnostician may be more efficient. We examine an important special case of this problem: the costs and health outcomes of elderly Medicare beneficiaries with coronary artery disease. We compare the empirical consequences of diagnosis by an "integrated" cardiologist -- one who can provide surgical treatment -- to the consequences of diagnosis by a non-integrated cardiologist. Diagnosis by an integrated cardiologist leads, on net, to higher health spending but similar health outco...