ArticleThe journal of political economy2015
Measuring Returns to Hospital Care: Evidence from Ambulance Referral Patterns.
Article in The journal of political economy, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A Systematic Review of the Association Between Hospital Cost/price and the Quality of Care.Applied health economics and health policy · 2020Pooled it
- The Labor Market and Health Impacts of Reducing Cesarean Section Deliveries.The Journal of human resources · 2026Article
- Evaluating hospital performance.The European journal of health economics : HEPAC : health economics in prevention and care · 2026Article
- Making Bricks from Straw: Resources and Productivity in Health Care.The American economic review · 2026Article
- Financial dynamics and post-pandemic recovery of a public multidisciplinary hospital in Kazakhstan: a five-year financial case study.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Using natural experiments to evaluate population health and health system interventions: new framework for producers and users of evidence.BMJ (Clinical research ed.) · 2025Article
- Doing More with Less: Predicting Primary Care Provider Effectiveness.The review of economics and statistics · 2025Article
- Paying for advance care planning in medicare: Impacts on care and spending near end of life.Journal of health economics · 2024Article
- MONITORING FOR WASTE: EVIDENCE FROM MEDICARE AUDITS.The quarterly journal of economics · 2024Article
- The unexpected costs of expertise: evidence from highly specialized physicians.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Is There a VA Advantage? Evidence from Dually Eligible Veterans.The American economic review · 2023Article
- Public and Private Options in Practice: The Military Health System.American economic journal. Economic policy · 2023Article
- What Difference Does a Health Plan Make? Evidence from Random Plan Assignment in Medicaid.American economic journal. Applied economics · 2023Article
- Ambulance use and subsequent fragmented hospital readmission among older adults.Journal of the American Geriatrics Society · 2023Article
- Performance on Patient Experience Measures of Former Chief Medical Residents as Physician Exemplars Chosen by the Profession.JAMA internal medicine · 2023Article
- JUE Insight: Is hospital quality predictive of pandemic deaths? Evidence from US counties.Journal of urban economics · 2023Article
- Cost variation and revisit rate for adult patients with asthma presenting to the emergency department.The American journal of emergency medicine · 2022Observational
- Ambulance diversion and ED destination by race/ethnicity: evaluation of Massachusetts' ambulance diversion ban.BMC health services research · 2022Article
- Selection with Variation in Diagnostic Skill: Evidence from Radiologists.The quarterly journal of economics · 2022Article
- Potential bypassing of nearest emergency department by EMS transports.Health services research · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Medicare spending exceeds 4% of GDP in the US each year, and there are concerns that moral hazard problems have led to overspending. This paper considers whether hospitals that treat patients more aggressively and receive higher payments from Medicare improve health outcomes for their patients. An innovation is a new lens to compare hospital performance for emergency patients: plausibly exogenous variation in ambulance-company assignment among patients who live near one another. Using Medicare data from 2002-2010, we show that ambulance company assignment importantly affects hospital choice for patients in the same ZIP code. Using data for New York State from 2000-2006 that matches exact patient addresses to hospital discharge records, we show that patients who live very near each other but on either side of ambulance service area boundaries go to different types of hospitals. Both identification strategies show that higher-cost hospitals achieve better patient outcomes for a variety of emergency conditions. Using our Medicare sample, the estimates imply that a one standard deviation increase in Medicare reimbursement leads to a 4 percentage point reduction in mortality (10% compared to the mean). Taking into account one-year spending after the health shock, the implied cost per at least one year of life saved is approximately $80,000. These results are found across different types of hospitals and patients, as well across both identification strategies.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.