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Taking Care of the Budget? Practice-level Outcomes during Commissioning Reforms in England

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  • Ted Pinchbeck

Abstract

I investigate whether vesting budgets with doctors impacts treatment decisions and patients outcomes by exploiting the transitional phase of major recent health care reforms in England that passed budgets to consortia of General Practitioners (GPs). Applying difference-in-difference techniques to balanced treatment and control groups, I find that practices becoming actively responsible for consortia budgets engaged in cost-saving prescribing and referral behaviour but that patients in these practices experienced a relative deterioration in the quality of their care. I discuss a number of explanations for these results, including that the reforms incentivised doctors to reduce quality in order to save cash or that they simply distracted those doctors most closely involved.

Suggested Citation

  • Ted Pinchbeck, 2016. "Taking Care of the Budget? Practice-level Outcomes during Commissioning Reforms in England," SERC Discussion Papers 0192, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:sercdp:0192
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    NHS reforms; commissioning; primary care; health care budgets;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H51 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Health
    • I11 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Analysis of Health Care Markets
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
    • J44 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Professional Labor Markets and Occupations
    • C33 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables - - - Models with Panel Data; Spatio-temporal Models

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