Estimating the Price and Quality Relationship in U.S. Hospitals
We aim to overcome the selection issues when patients, in the United States, choose where to receive care to uncover the relationship between price and quality of care. We also briefly present a similar approach for estimating the relationship between for-profit hospital status and hospital admission decisions. For both of those, we use an instrumental variable approach which exploits that ambulance companies are quasi-randomly assigned to transport patients and have strong preferences for certain hospitals. We show a strong relationship between higher prices and lower mortality, which has important implications for healthcare price regulation. Being admitted to a hospital with two standard deviations higher prices raises spending by 52% and lowers mortality by 1 percentage point (35%). However, the relationship between higher prices and lower mortality is only present at hospitals in less concentrated markets. Receiving care from an expensive hospital in a concentrated market increases spending but has no detectable effect on mortality.
Date: 2 December 2022, 15:15 (Friday, 8th week, Michaelmas 2022)
Venue: Manor Road Building, Manor Road OX1 3UQ
Venue Details: Skills Lab or https://zoom.us/j/97316381707?pwd=WDdBVlJVVU1Ga3JnRW15c0RnNlE5QT09
Speaker: Elodie Chervin (University of Oxford)
Organising department: Department of Economics
Part of: Novel Ideas: MPhil Seminar Series
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Emma Heritage