How much uncompensated care do doctors provide?
By: Jonathan Gruber, David Rodriguez
Contributors: Rodriguez, David, 1975-; National Bureau of Economic Research
Series: NBER working paper series -- working paper 13585; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) -- working paper no. 13585.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2007
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: [electronic resource] /
Description: "The magnitude of provider uncompensated care has become an important public policy issue.  Yet existing measures of uncompensated care are flawed because they compare uninsured payments to list prices, not to the prices actually paid by the insured.  We address this issue using a novel source of data from a vendor that processes financial data for almost 4000 physicians.  We measure uncompensated care as the net amount that physicians lose by lower payments from the uninsured than from the insured.  Our best estimate is that physicians provide negative uncompensated care to the uninsured, earning more on uninsured patients than on insured patients with comparable treatments.  Even our most conservative estimates suggest that uncompensated care amounts to only 0.8% of revenues, or at most $3.2 billion nationally.  These results highlight the important distinction between charges and payments, and point to the need for a re-definition of uncompensated care in the health sector going forward"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Title from PDF file as viewed on 11/20/2007.

Includes bibliographical references.

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