Competition, Gatekeeping, and Health Care Access

We study the impact of competition on primary care physicians’specialty referrals. Our data come from a Norwegian survey in 2008-9 and Statistics Norway. From the data we construct three measures of competition the number of open primary physician practices with and without population adjustment, and the Her…ndahl-Hirschman Index. We build a theoretical model, and derive two opposing e¤ects of competition on gatekeeping physicians’ specialty referrals. The empirical results suggest that competition has negligible or small positive e¤ects on referrals. Our results do not support the policy claim that increasing the number of primary care physicians reduces secondary care.