Assessing the Quality of Public Services: For-profits, Chains, and Concentration in the Hospital Market

Johannes S. Kunz (), Carol Propper, Kevin Staub and Rainer Winkelmann
Additional contact information
Johannes S. Kunz: Monash University

No 2023-01, Working Papers from Centre for Health Economics, Monash University

Abstract: We examine variation in US hospital quality across ownership, chain membership, and market concentration. We use a new measure of quality derived from the penalties imposed on hospitals under the flagship Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program. We document a robust and sizable negative for-profit quality gap: for-profit hospitals are consistently of lower quality. We find that a substantial part of the gap is related to being located in less competitive markets. This reduction occurs most for hospitals that are part of large national chains. For such hospitals we find no quality gap in fully competitive markets.

Keywords: Hospital Readmissions; Affordable Care Act; Hospital Quality; Competition; Hospital Chains (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 I11 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://monash-ch-econ-wps.s3-ap-southeast-2.amazon ... e/chemon/2023-01.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Assessing the quality of public services: For‐profits, chains, and concentration in the hospital market (2024)
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:mhe:chemon:2023-01

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://www.monash.edu/business/che

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Centre for Health Economics, Monash University Centre for Health Economics, Monash University, 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East VIC 3145.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Johannes Kunz ().