[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/quante/v6y2015i3p703-748.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Physicians' financial incentives and treatment choices in heart attack management

Author

Listed:
  • Dominic Coey
Abstract
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.

Suggested Citation

  • Dominic Coey, 2015. "Physicians' financial incentives and treatment choices in heart attack management," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 6(3), pages 703-748, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:quante:v:6:y:2015:i:3:p:703-748
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Abe Dunn & Adam Hale Shapiro, 2018. "Physician Competition and the Provision of Care: Evidence from Heart Attacks," American Journal of Health Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 4(2), pages 226-261, Spring.
    2. Yongmin Chen & Jianpei Li & Jin Zhang, 2022. "Efficient Liability In Expert Markets," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 63(4), pages 1717-1744, November.
    3. Dauth, Christine, 2021. "The effects of private versus public health insurance on health and labor market outcomes," IAB-Discussion Paper 202103, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany].
    4. Lundborg, Petter & James, Stefan & Lagerqvist, Bo & Vikström, Johan, 2021. "Learning-by-Doing and Productivity Growth among High-Skilled Workers: Evidence from the Treatment of Heart Attacks," IZA Discussion Papers 14744, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Simon Reif & Lucas Hafner & Michael Seebauer, 2020. "Physician Behavior under Prospective Payment Schemes—Evidence from Artefactual Field and Lab Experiments," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(15), pages 1-37, July.
    6. Diane Alexander & Molly Schnell, 2024. "The Impacts of Physician Payments on Patient Access, Use, and Health," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 16(3), pages 142-177, July.
    7. SUN Jessica Ya & YIN Ting & LIU Zhiyong, 2023. "When State Becomes the Only Buyer: Effects of national volume-based procurement of cardiac stents in China," Discussion papers 23065, Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI).
    8. Nibene H. Somé & Bernard Fortin & Bruce Shearer, 2024. "Measuring physicians' response to incentives: Labour supply, multitasking and earnings," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 57(2), pages 622-661, May.
    9. Meng‐Chi Tang, 2023. "A structural analysis of physician agency and pharmaceutical demand," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 32(7), pages 1453-1477, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:quante:v:6:y:2015:i:3:p:703-748. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/essssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.