IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/0946.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Cost Implications of Hospital Unionization: A Behavioral Analysis

Author

Listed:
  • David S. Salkever

Abstract

The growth of unionization among hospital workers was sharply accelerated by the 1974 amendments to the NLRA covering voluntary hospital workers. With continuing inflationary pressures in the hospital sector, the cost implications of the recent and projected growth of hospital unions is of some concern to policy-makers . This paper presents estimates of union cost impacts based on data from hospitals in the states of Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania. Cross-sectional regressions with data for 1975 yield positive union impacts of 3.3 percent on total costs, 4.1 to 5.9 percent on cost per case, and 6.1 percent on cost per day. Re-estimation of the model with data on changes over the 1971 -75 period yields similar results. We also find that the cost impact of unionization varies with the pattern of coverage (being lower for service employees and RN's) and with the extent of cost-based reimbursement. This suggests that future cost impacts of union growth may be moderated as prospective payment systems for hospital s become more widespread.

Suggested Citation

  • David S. Salkever, 1982. "Cost Implications of Hospital Unionization: A Behavioral Analysis," NBER Working Papers 0946, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:0946
    Note: EH
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w0946.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Steven G. Allen, 1986. "Can Union Labor Ever Cost Less?," NBER Working Papers 2019, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    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:nbr:nberwo:0946. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.