Hospital Billing Regulations and Financial Well-Being: Evidence from California’s Fair Pricing Law

Yaa Akosa Antwi, Marion Aouad and Nathan Blascak

No 35080, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We examine the financial consequences of the 2007 California Fair Pricing Law, which places a price ceiling on hospital bills for financially vulnerable individuals. Using cross-sectional variation in exposure to the law, proxied by county-level uninsured rates, we estimate its impact on individual financial outcomes. We find that the law reduces the likelihood of incurring non-medical debt in collections and the number of non-medical accounts in collections. In addition, we find evidence that credit scores increased and suggestive evidence that the number of delinquent accounts decreased for individuals in more exposed counties. Our results suggest hospital billing regulations can improve targeted individuals’ financial outcomes.

JEL-codes: G51 I1 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Note: EH
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35080.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Hospital Billing Regulations and Financial Well-Being: Evidence from California’s Fair Pricing Law (2025)
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:35080

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35080
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

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 ().