Artikel
Physicians' financial incentives and treatment choices in heart attack management
Using a large set of private health insurance claims, we estimate how physicians' financial incentives affect their treatment choices in heart attack management. Different insurance plans pay physicians different amounts for the same services, generating the required variation in financial incentives. We begin by presenting evidence that, unconditionally, plans that pay physicians more for more invasive treatments are associated with a larger fraction of such treatments. To interpret this correlation as causal, we continue by showing that it survives conditioning on a rich set of diagnosis and provider-specific variables. We perform a host of additional checks to verify that differences in unobservable patient or provider characteristics across plans are unlikely to be driving our results. We find that physicians' treatment choices respond positively to the payments they receive, and that the response is quite large. If physicians received bundled payments instead of fee-for-service incentives, for example, heart attack management would become considerably more conservative. Our estimates imply that 20 percent of patients would receive different treatments, physician costs would decrease by 27 percent, and social welfare would increase.
- Language
-
Englisch
- Bibliographic citation
-
Journal: Quantitative Economics ; ISSN: 1759-7331 ; Volume: 6 ; Year: 2015 ; Issue: 3 ; Pages: 703-748 ; New Haven, CT: The Econometric Society
- Classification
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Wirtschaft
- Subject
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Physician incentives
physician treatment choices
health insurance
heart attack management
fee-for-service payments
- Event
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Geistige Schöpfung
- (who)
-
Coey, Dominic
- Event
-
Veröffentlichung
- (who)
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The Econometric Society
- (where)
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New Haven, CT
- (when)
-
2015
- DOI
-
doi:10.3982/QE365
- Handle
- Last update
-
10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET
Data provider
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. If you have any questions about the object, please contact the data provider.
Object type
- Artikel
Associated
- Coey, Dominic
- The Econometric Society
Time of origin
- 2015
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