This paper seeks to understand the impact of the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility (Flex) Program on hospital choice … and consumer welfare for rural residents. The Flex Program created a new class of hospital, the Critical Access Hospital … (CAH), which receives more generous Medicare reimbursements in return for limits on capacity and length of stay. We find …

terms of increased access to hospital care for newly eligible children, so that there is an overall 10% rise in child …

low-cost users and this pressure may be increased by competition. We use data on hospital charges and cost … before and after the establishment of the Medicare Prospective Payment System (PPS). Comparing persons above and below age 65 … expensive patients. This raises important issues relevant to the use Of competition and prospective payment to control costs and …

: consumer surplus from a hospital demand system and the fraction of population hospital admissions that would be covered by the …

Medicare's prospective payment system for long-term acute-care hospitals (LTCHs) pro- vides modest reimbursements at … of days. We show that LTCHs respond to financial incentives by disproportionately discharging patients after they cross … the large-payment threshold, resulting in worse outcomes for patients. We find this occurs more often at for …

Patients who receive more hospital treatment tend to have worse underlying health, confounding estimates of the returns … to such care. This paper compares the costs and benefits of extending the length of hospital stay following delivery … entitle newborns to a minimum number of hospital quot;days,quot; counted as the number of midnights in care. A newborn …

the spillover effects of the Medicare Advantage program on the traditional Medicare program and other patients, taking … system. We find that when more seniors enroll in Medicare managed care, hospital costs decline for all seniors and for …More than a quarter of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in Medicare Advantage, which was created in large part to …

design to examine effects of the expansion on health insurance coverage, hospital use, and patient health. We then link these … changes to effects on hospital finances. We show that a substantial share of the federally-funded Medicaid expansion … hospital revenue and profitability, with larger gains for government hospitals. On the benefits side, we do not detect …

– ambulances usually take patients to the closest (or affiliated) hospital. In this paper, we derive a theoretically appropriate ….S. regional hospital markets to instrument for market concentration. We then estimate the model using risk-adjusted Medicare data … for diseases with the greatest profitability and demand elasticity. Most empirical evidence regarding hospital competition …

Poor and uneducated patients may not know what health care is desirable and, if fully insured, have little incentive to …