EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Regulating Out-of-Network Hospital Payments: Disagreement Payoffs, Negotiated Prices, and Access

Elena Prager and Nicholas Tilipman

No 33727, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Recent policy proposals seek to regulate out-of-network hospital prices. We study how such regulation affects equilibrium prices, network formation, and hospital exit. We estimate a structural model of insurer-hospital bargaining that allows for out-of-network transactions between non-contracting parties. These transactions generate a notion of exit by rendering hospitals unprofitable under some regulations. Estimation relies on a novel measure of out-of-network prices. We find that reducing out-of-network prices would also lower negotiated prices, but potentially at the cost of narrower hospital networks. Aggressive regulation could induce substantial hospital exit, but only under the restrictive assumption that negotiators cannot anticipate the exits.

JEL-codes: C78 I11 L13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-gth, nep-hea, nep-net and nep-reg
Note: EH IO
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33727.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:33727

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33727
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

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 ().

 
Page updated 2025-05-28
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33727