The Economic Consequences of Hospital Admissions
Carlos Dobkin,
Amy Finkelstein,
Raymond Kluender and
Matthew Notowidigdo
Santa Cruz Department of Economics, Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Cruz
Abstract:
We use an event study approach to examine the economic consequences of hospital admissions for adults in two datasets: survey data from the Health and Retirement Study, and hospitalization data linked to credit reports. For non-elderly adults with health insurance, hospital admissions increase out-of-pocket medical spending, unpaid medical bills and bankruptcy, and reduce earnings, income, access to credit and consumer borrowing. The earnings decline is substantial compared to the out-of-pocket spending increase, and is minimally insured prior to age-eligibility for Social Security Retirement Income. Relative to the insured non-elderly, the uninsured non-elderly experience much larger increases in unpaid medical bills and bankruptcy rates following a hospital admission. Hospital admissions trigger less than 5 percent of all bankruptcies.
Keywords: Patient Safety; Basic Behavioral and Social Science; Clinical Research; Aging; Behavioral and Social Science; Generic health relevance; Adult; Bankruptcy; Demography; Financing; Personal; Hospitalization; Humans; Insurance; Health; Medically Uninsured; Middle Aged; Patient Admission; United States; D14; Health insurance; I10; I13; bankruptcy; consumer finance; consumption smoothing; Economics; Commerce; Management; Tourism and Services (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-02-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (76)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/3m71z8vr.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: The Economic Consequences of Hospital Admissions (2018) 
Working Paper: The Economic Consequences of Hospital Admissions (2016) 
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:cdl:ucscec:qt3m71z8vr
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Santa Cruz Department of Economics, Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Cruz Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().