Medicare's prospective payment system for long-term acute-care hospitals (LTCHs) pro- vides modest reimbursements at the beginning of a patient's stay before jumping discontinuously to a large lump-sum payment after a pre-specified number of days. We show that LTCHs respond to financial...

We investigate the hypothesis that increasing access for the indigent to physician offices shifts care from hospital outpatient settings and lowers Medicaid costs (the so-called offset effect'). To evaluate this hypothesis we exploit a large increase in physician fees in the Tennessee Medicaid...

Policymakers are increasingly interested in reducing healthcare costs and inefficiencies through innovative payment strategies. These strategies may have heterogeneous impacts across geographic areas, potentially reducing or exacerbating geographic variation in healthcare spending. In this...

In April 2006, the state of Massachusetts passed legislation aimed at achieving near universal health insurance coverage. A key provision of this legislation, and of the national legislation passed in March 2010, is an individual mandate to obtain health insurance. Although previous researchers...

American hospitals are required to provide emergency medical care to the uninsured. We use previously confidential hospital financial data to study the resulting uncompensated care, medical care for which no payment is received. We use both panel-data methods and case studies from state-wide...

Mergers that affiliate a hospital with a Catholic owner, network, or system reduce the set of possible reproductive medical procedures since Catholic hospitals have strict prohibitions on contraception. Using changes in ownership of hospitals, we find that Catholic hospitals reduce the per bed...

The Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP) and the Hospital Value Based Purchasing Program (HVBP), two components of the Affordable Care Act's cost containment measures, introduced potentially sizeable penalties to underperforming hospitals across a variety of metrics. To the extent that...

We examine the relationship between the adoption of EMR and hospital operating costs. We first identify a puzzle that has been seen in prior studies: Adoption of EMR is associated with a slight cost increase. We draw on the literature on IT and productivity to demonstrate that the average effect...

We use data from California to document and offer possible explanations for the sharp increase in hospital prices charged to private payers after 1999. We find a downward trend in price for private pay patients in the 1990s and a rapid upward trend beginning in 1999, amounting to an annual...