NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Is Hospital Competition Socially Wasteful?

Daniel P. Kessler, Mark B. McClellan

NBER Working Paper No. 7266*
Issued in July 1999
NBER Program(s):   HC

An NBER digest for this paper is available.

The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this.  You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email.

We study the consequences of hospital competition for Medicare beneficiaries' heart attack care from 1985 to 1994. We examine how relatively exogenous determinants of hospital choice such as travel distances influence the competitiveness of hospital markets, and how hospital competition interacts with the influence of managed care organizations to affect the key determinants of social welfare expenditures on treatment and patient health outcomes. In the 1980s, the welfare effects of competition were ambiguous; but in the 1990s, competition unambiguously improves social welfare. Increasing HMO enrollment over the sample period partially explains the dramatic change in the impact of hospital competition.

*Published: Kessler, Daniel P. and Mark B. McClellan. "Is Hospital Competition Socially Wasteful?," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2000, v115(2,May), 577-615.

You may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format from SSRN.com ($5) for electronic delivery.

Information about Free Papers

You should expect a free download if you are a subscriber, a corporate associate of the NBER, a journalist, a site with your domain name in ".GOV", or a resident of nearly any developing country or transition economy.

If you usually get free papers at work/university but do not at home, you can either connect to your work VPN or proxy (if any) or elect to have a link to the paper emailed to your work email address below. The email address must be connected to a subscribing college, university, or other subscribing institution. Gmail and other free email addresses will not have access.

E-mail:

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

 
Publications
Activities
Meetings
Data
People
About

National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138; 617-868-3900; email: info@nber.org