Measuring Returns to Hospital Care: Evidence from Ambulance Referral Patterns

Joseph J. Doyle, John A. Graves, Jonathan Gruber and Samuel Kleiner

Journal of Political Economy, 2015, vol. 123, issue 1, 170 - 214

Abstract: We consider whether hospitals that receive higher payments from Medicare improve patient outcomes, using exogenous variation in ambulance company assignment among patients who live near one another. Using Medicare data from 2002-10 on assignment across ambulance companies and New York State data from 2000-6 on assignment across area boundaries, we find that patients who are brought to higher-cost hospitals achieve better outcomes. Our estimates imply that a one standard deviation increase in Medicare reimbursement leads to a 4 percentage point (or 10 percent) reduction in mortality; the implied cost per at least 1 year of life saved is approximately $80,000.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (97)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/677756 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/677756 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/677756

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Political Economy from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().