Are Patients in the Transition World Paying Unofficially to Stay Longer in Hospital? Some Evidence from Kazakhstan

To empirically test whether, as surveys and anedoctal reports suggest, patients are paying to stay longer in hospital, perceived as resulting in better care (e.g. more professional attention), a unique dataset is constructed on hospital length of stay, severity, unofficial payments and socio-economic characteristics (age, gender, occupation and income) from a survey on 1508 trauma and surgical patients discharged from Almaty City (the former capital of Kazakhstan) three main hospitals between 1999 and 2000.