Are Publicly Insured Children Less Likely to be Admitted to Hospital than the Privately Insured (and Does it Matter)?

Diane Alexander and Janet Currie

No 22542, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: There is continuing controversy about the extent to which publicly insured children are treated differently than privately insured children, and whether differences in treatment matter. We show that on average, hospitals are less likely to admit publicly insured children than privately insured children who present at the ER and the gap grows during high flu weeks, when hospital beds are in high demand. This pattern is present even after controlling for detailed diagnostic categories and hospital fixed effects, but does not appear to have any effect on measurable health outcomes such as repeat ER visits and future hospitalizations. Hence, our results raise the possibility that instead of too few publicly insured children being admitted during high flu weeks, there are too many publicly and privately insured children being admitted most of the time.

JEL-codes: I13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
Note: CH EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Diane Alexander & Janet Currie, 2017. "Are publicly insured children less likely to be admitted to hospital than the privately insured (and does it matter)?," Economics & Human Biology, vol 25, pages 33-51.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22542.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Are publicly insured children less likely to be admitted to hospital than the privately insured (and does it matter)? (2017)
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:22542

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22542

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 ().