Can Amputation Save the Hospital? The Impact of the Medicare Rural Flexibility Program on Demand and Welfare
- Author(s)
- Gautam Gowrisankaran, Claudio Lucarelli, Philipp Schmidt-Dengler, Robert Town
- Abstract
This paper seeks to understand the impact of the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility (Flex) Program on rural resident hospital choice and welfare. The Flex program created a new class of hospital, the Critical Access Hospital (CAH), which receives more generous reimbursement in return for limits on capacity and length of stay. A hospital that converted to CAH status would see its inpatient admissions drop by a mean of 5.4%, of which almost all was driven by factors other than capacity. The program increased consumer welfare if it reduced the closure rate by at least 4 percentage points.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Economics
- No. of pages
- 36
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3386/w18894
- Publication date
- 03-2013
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 303010 Health economics, 502039 Structural policy
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/5d60d2a9-4693-4acd-b6bb-3acd432e9228