Competition and prospective payment systems have been widely used to attempt to control health care costs. Though much of the increase in medical costs over the past half-century has been concentrated among a few high-cost users of health care,prospective payment systems may provide incentives...

Competition and prospective payment systems have been widely used to attempt to control health care costs. Though much of the increase in medical costs over the past half-century has been concentrated among a few high-cost users of health care,prospective payment systems may provide incentives...

Competition and prospective payment have been widely used to control health care costs but may together provide incentives to selectively reduce expenditures on high-cost relative to low-cost users. We use patient discharge and hospital financial data from California to examine the effects of...