The Effect of Hospital/Physician Integration on Hospital Choice

In this paper, we estimate how hospital ownership of physicians’ practices affects their patients’ hospital choices. We match data on the hospital admissions of Medicare beneficiaries, including the identity of their admitting physician, with data on the identity of the owner of the admitting physician’s practice. We find that a hospital's ownership of an admitting physician’s practice dramatically increases the probability that the physician's patients will choose the owning hospital. We also find that patients are more likely to choose a high-cost, low-quality hospital when their admitting physician’s practice is owned by that hospital.