Measuring Welfare from Ambulatory Surgery Centers: A Spatial Analysis of Demand for Healthcare Facilities |
| |
| Authors: | Ellerie Weber |
| |
| Affiliation: | School of Public Health, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, , Texas, U.S.A.Many thanks to Kevin Murphy, Guy David, Chad Syverson, Marty Gaynor, Bob Town, Will Manning, Kyna Fong, Gary Fournier, Kevin Holt and Navdeep Sahni for useful conversations and feedback, as well as to seminar participants at University of Chicago, Clemson University, University of Aberdeen, RAND, University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Boston College. Thanks, too, to Todd Schuble for help with GIS and the spatial data, and to Gary Briggs for computational advice from RAND. Remaining errors are my own. |
| |
| Abstract: | This paper studies competition between healthcare facilities, particularly between hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers (ASC's), in the market for outpatient surgery. The goal is to answer questions about the existence and magnitude of welfare gains earned from the use of ASC's. These questions are relevant to current policy debates about the usefulness of ASC's. I calculate welfare by specifying a multinomial logit model of consumer demand for healthcare facilities, and estimating structural elements of demand functions. Total elimination of ASC's results in between 10.2 and 28.1 minutes of welfare loss per patient surgery. |
| |
| Keywords: | |
|
|
