TY  - JOUR
AU  - Duggan,Mark
TI  - Hospital Ownership and Public Medical Spending
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 7789
PY  - 2000
Y2  - July 2000
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7789
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7789.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Mark Duggan
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania
1452 Steinberg Hall-Dietrich Hall
3620 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Tel: 215-898-0928
Fax: 215-898-7635
E-Mail: mduggan@wharton.upenn.edu
AB  - The hospital market is served by firms that are private for-profit, private not-for-profit, and government-owned and operated. I use a plausibly exogenous change in hospital financing that was intended to improve medical care for the poor to test three theories of organizational behavior.  My results reveal that the critical difference between the three types of hospitals owes to the soft budget constraint of government-owned institutions.   The decision-makers in private not-for-profit hospitals are just as responsive to financial incentives and are no more altruistic than their counterparts in profit-maximizing facilities.  My final set of results suggests that the significant increase in public medical spending examined in this paper did not improve health outcomes for the indigent.
ER  -