Natural Disasters and Elective Medical Services: How Big is the Bounce-Back?

Tatyana Deryugina, Jonathan Gruber and Adrienne Sabety

No 27505, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: COVID-19 has created a dual set of stresses on health care systems worldwide: a rise in expensive intensive care services and a dramatic decline in elective services. The U.S. government has responded with both grant and loan programs to help health care providers weather the storm. But the optimal size and nature of such programs are hard to evaluate without an understanding of the ability of providers to make up their lost elective service revenues over time. In this paper, we study the closest relevant parallel to the reduction in elective services seen under COVID-19: hurricanes. We match information on hurricanes to data on Medicare hospital elective visits and charges from 1997-2013, comparing counties impacted by hurricanes to nearby unaffected counties. We find that the average hurricane reduces elective services by about 7% in the month it makes landfall. For the most severe hurricanes, we estimate a reduction of more than 20%. Services return to baseline fairly rapidly, but for severe hurricanes it takes a year or more to make up lost revenues. Projections based on variation in hurricane severity suggest that it will take over 3 years for providers to make up the lost revenue from COVID-19.

JEL-codes: H12 I11 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-hea
Note: AG EEE EH PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27505.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:nbr:nberwo:27505

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27505

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().