Physician Quality and Health Care for the Poor and Uninsured

Lara Bryant () and Sharmila Vishwasrao
Additional contact information
Lara Bryant: Department of Economics, College of Business, Florida Atlantic University

No 6001, Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of Business, Florida Atlantic University

Abstract: Many studies have documented adverse health outcomes for uninsured patients in U.S. hospitals. These poor outcomes have been attributed to their health status and limited access to healthcare. A measure of treatment that remains unexplored is the quality of the physicians treating uninsured patients. We examine whether uninsured and poor patients are treated by lower quality physicians with four measures of physician quality. Using a hospital fixed-effects model, we find that cardiac patients are matched to physician quality based on their ability to pay. Even after controlling for average physician quality within a hospital and patient characteristics, we find that uninsured and Medicaid patients are generally treated by lower quality physicians. We also find that while for-profit and not-for-profit hospitals treat the uninsured with lower quality physicians, government hospitals do not. However, there is evidence that hospitals of all ownership types treat Medicaid patients with lower quality physicians.

Keywords: Uninsured; Medicaid; Physician Quality; Hospital Ownership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I11 I18 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2006-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://home.fau.edu/svishwas/web/Physician%20Quality%20and%20Outcomes2.pdf Revised version, 2007 (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:fal:wpaper:06001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of Business, Florida Atlantic University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vadym Volosovych ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).