From Harvard U: Hospital ownership type and treatment choices

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22425769

J Health Econ. 2012 Jan 26;31(2):359-370. [Epub ahead of print]

Hospital ownership type and treatment choices.

Bayindir EE.

Source

Department of Economics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States.

Abstract

In the face of increasing health care costs, taxing not-for-profit hospitals may be seen as the right choice to increasegovernment revenues if not-for-profit hospitals are not different from their for-profit counterparts. This study investigates how hospital ownership type affects treatment choices to show whether ownership type and teaching status are correlated with choosing a procedure as the treatment and how these choices relate to patient insurance type. Not-for-profit hospitals significantly differ from for-profits in terms of treatment choices of less profitable patients and all hospitals are more likely to accord the procedure when the patient is privately insured than uninsured though teaching government hospitals are the most likely to accord the procedures for all insurance types. Considering treatment choices, not-for-profit hospitals have different objectives than for-profit and government hospitals and in terms of profit-seeking behavior, not-for-profit hospitals seem to lie between for-profit and government hospitals.