The Effect of Physician Fees and Density Differences on Regional Variation in Hospital Treatments

Rudy Douven (), Remco Mocking and Ilaria Mosca
Additional contact information
Rudy Douven: CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis

No 208, CPB Discussion Paper from CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis

Abstract: We use a panel data set of about 1.7 million hospital records in 4,000 Dutch zip code regions for the years 2006-2009. We estimate the effect of physician fees and physician density on regional variation in hospital care for nine different treatments. We use a panel data set of about 1.7 million hospital records in 4,000 Dutch zip code regions for the years 2006-2009. We estimate the effect of physician fees and physician density on regional variation in hospital care for nine different treatments. Our results show that a 1 percent increase in the total number of physicians, if these extra physicians are all paid according to an output-based reimbursement scheme, would increase the number of treatments on average by 0.40 percent. For salaried physicians we find a significantly lower average effect of 0.15 percent. We find no or weak effects for hip fractures, which is included in the analysis as a control treatment. Our data allows us to deal with reverse causality, excess demand, border crossing, and availability effects. Our findings lend support to the existence of supplier induced demand for the majority of the analyzed treatments.

Date: 2012-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hea and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cpb.nl/sites/default/files/publicaties ... n-hospital-treat.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpb:discus:208

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CPB Discussion Paper from CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().