TY - JOUR AU - Dranove,David AU - Kessler,Daniel AU - McClellan,Mark AU - Satterthwaite,Mark TI - Is More Information Better? The Effects of 'Report Cards' on Health Care Providers JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 8697 PY - 2002 Y2 - January 2002 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8697 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8697.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Daniel Kessler Graduate School of Business Stanford University 518 Memorial Way, Room L241 Stanford, CA 94305 Tel: 650/723-4492 Fax: 650/725-6152 E-Mail: fkessler@stanford.edu Mark B. McClellan Director, Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform Senior Fellow, Economic Studies Leonard .D. Schaeffer Director's Chair in Health Policy ,The Brookings Institution 1775 Massachusetts avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20036 Tel: (202) 741-6567 Fax: NA E-Mail: mmcclellan@brookings.edu M1 - published as Dranove, David, Daniel Kessler, Mark McClellan and Mark Satterthwaite. "Is More Information Better? The Effects Of `Report Cards' On Health Care Providers," Journal of Political Economy, 2003, v111(3,Jun), 555-588. AB - Health care report cards - public disclosure of patient health outcomes at the level of the individual physician and/or hospital - may address important informational asymmetries in markets for health care, but they may also give doctors and hospitals incentives to decline to treat more difficult, severely ill patients. Whether report cards are good for patients and for society depends on whether their financial and health benefits outweigh their costs in terms of the quantity, quality, and appropriateness of medical treatment that they induce. Using national data on Medicare patients at risk for cardiac surgery, we find that cardiac surgery report cards in New York and Pennsylvania led both to selection behavior by providers and to improved matching of patients with hospitals. On net, this led to higher levels of resource use and to worse health outcomes, particularly for sicker patients. We conclude that, at least in the short run, these report cards decreased patient and social welfare. ER -