We analyze whether receiving care from higher-priced hospitals leads to lower mortality. We overcome selection issues by using an instrumental variable approach which exploits that ambulance companies are quasi-randomly assigned to transport patients and have strong preferences for certain...

We study a 2008 policy reform in which Medicare revised its hospital payment system to better reflect patients' severity of illness. We construct a simulated instrument that predicts a hospital's policy-induced change in reimbursement using pre-reform patients and post-reform rules. The reform...

Hospitals face large and variable costs from treating indigent care patients. Two methods of "reinsuring" hospitals against these costs are providing these patients with insurance and directly providing hospitals with supplemental payments to cover the expected costs of treating the indigent....

In this article, we provide a comprehensive, empirical assessment of the hypothesis that the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) affected hospital readmissions. In doing so, we provide evidence as to the validity of prior empirical approaches used to evaluate the HRRP and we present...

The growth of unionization among hospital workers was sharply accelerated by the 1974 amendments to the NLRA covering voluntary hospital workers. With continuing inflationary pressures in the hospital sector, the cost implications of the recent and projected growth of hospital unions is of some...

A topic of continued public concern is the national level and distribution among areas and individuals of the availability of hospital services. This paper presents data for the country as a whole on hospital utilization during the post World War II period for short-term non-federal hospitals....

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) authorized the largest expansion of public health insurance in the U.S. since the mid-1960s. We exploit ACA-induced changes in the discontinuity in coverage at age 65 using a regression discontinuity based design to examine effects of the expansion on health...

A literature has found that medical providers inflate bills and report more conditions given financial incentives. We evaluate whether Medicare reimbursement incentives are driven more by bill inflation or coding costs. Medicare reformed its payment mechanism for inpatient hospitalizations in...

We study a unique all-payer data set spanning 38 states to examine the differences in inpatient reimbursement rates paid by traditional Medicare (TM), Medicare Advantage (MA), Medicaid, and private (under-65) insurers, and the differences in negotiated rates across the 60 largest private...

While economic theories indicate that market power by downstream firms can potentially counteract market power upstream, antitrust policy is opaque about whether to incorporate countervailing market power in merger analyses. We use detailed national claims data from the healthcare sector to...