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Does Competition Improve Public Hospitals' Efficiency? Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in the English National Health Service

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  • Zack Cooper
  • Stephen Gibbons
  • Simon Jones
  • Alistair McGuire

Abstract

This paper uses a difference-in-difference style estimation strategy to test separately the impact of competition from public sector and private sector hospitals on the efficiency of public hospitals. Our identification strategy takes advantage of the phased introduction of a recent set of substantive reforms introduced in the English NHS from 2006 onwards. These reforms forced public sector health care providers to compete with other public hospitals and eventually to face competition from existing private sector providers for care delivered to publicly funded patients. In this study, we measure efficiency using hospitals' average length of stay (LOS) for patients undergoing elective surgery. For a more nuanced assessment of efficiency, we break LOS down into its two key components: the time from patients' admission to the hospital until their surgery and the time from their surgery until their discharge. Here, pre-surgery LOS serves as a proxy for hospitals' lean efficiency. Our results suggest that competition between public providers prompted public hospitals to improve their productivity by decreasing their pre-surgery, overall and post-surgery length of stay. In contrast, competition from private hospitals did not spur public providers to improve their performance and instead left incumbent public providers with a more costly case mix of patients and led to increases in post-surgical LOS.

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  • Zack Cooper & Stephen Gibbons & Simon Jones & Alistair McGuire, 2012. "Does Competition Improve Public Hospitals' Efficiency? Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in the English National Health Service," CEP Discussion Papers dp1125, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
  • Handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1125
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Brekke, Kurt R. & Canta, Chiara & Siciliani, Luigi & Straume, Odd Rune, 2021. "Hospital competition in a national health service: Evidence from a patient choice reform," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 79(C).
    2. Cooper, Zack & Gibbons, Stephen & Skellern, Matthew, 2018. "Does competition from private surgical centres improve public hospitals' performance? Evidence from the English National Health Service," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 166(C), pages 63-80.
    3. Jens Dietrichson & Lina Maria Ellegård & Gustav Kjellsson, 2020. "Patient choice, entry, and the quality of primary care: Evidence from Swedish reforms," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(6), pages 716-730, June.
    4. Guccio, C. & Lisi, D. & Martorana, M.F. & Pignataro, G., 2020. "Incorporating quality in the efficiency assessment of hospitals using a generalized directional distance function approach," Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers 20/17, HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York.
    5. Carrie Colla & Julie Bynum & Andrea Austin & Jonathan Skinner, 2016. "Hospital Competition, Quality, and Expenditures in the U.S. Medicare Population," NBER Working Papers 22826, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Kelly, Elaine & Stoye, George, 2020. "The impacts of private hospital entry on the public market for elective care in England," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(C).
    7. Rachet-Jacquet, Laurie & Gutacker, Nils & Siciliani, Luigi, 2021. "Scale economies in the health sector: The effect of hospital volume on health gains from hip replacement surgery," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 190(C), pages 704-729.
    8. Schmid, Andreas & Varkevisser, Marco, 2016. "Hospital merger control in Germany, the Netherlands and England: Experiences and challenges," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 120(1), pages 16-25.
    9. Francesco Longo & Luigi Siciliani & Hugh Gravelle & Rita Santos, 2017. "Do hospitals respond to rivals' quality and efficiency? A spatial panel econometric analysis," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 26(S2), pages 38-62, September.
    10. Francesco Longo & Luigi Siciliani & Hugh Gravelle & Rita Santos, 2017. "Do hospitals respond to rivals’ quality and efficiency? a spatial econometrics approach," Working Papers 144cherp, Centre for Health Economics, University of York.
    11. Francesco Longo & Luigi Siciliani & Giuseppe Moscelli & Hugh Gravelle, 2019. "Does hospital competition improve efficiency? The effect of the patient choice reform in England," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(5), pages 618-640, May.
    12. Molem Christopher S. & Beri Parfait B. & Ntangsi Max M., 2017. "Determinants of the Inefficiency of Public Hospitals in Cameroon," International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, Human Resource Management Academic Research Society, International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, vol. 7(6), pages 404-419, June.
    13. Cinaroglu, Songul, 2021. "Changes in hospital efficiency and size: An integrated propensity score matching with data envelopment analysis," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 76(C).
    14. Kristian Niemietz, 2015. "Internal Markets, Management by Targets, and Quasi-Markets: An Analysis of Health Care Reforms in the English NHS," Economic Affairs, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(1), pages 93-108, February.
    15. J. Buckell & A. Smith & R. Longo & D. Holland, 2015. "Efficiency, heterogeneity and cost function analysis: empirical evidence from pathology services in the National Health Service in England," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 47(31), pages 3311-3331, July.
    16. Aleksandar Medarević & Dejana Vuković, 2021. "Efficiency and Productivity of Public Hospitals in Serbia Using DEA-Malmquist Model and Tobit Regression Model, 2015–2019," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(23), pages 1-22, November.
    17. John Buckell & Andrew Smith & Roberta Longo & David Holland, 2013. "Health inefficiency and unobservable heterogeneity - empirical evidence from pathology services in the UK National Health Service," Working Papers 1307, Academic Unit of Health Economics, Leeds Institute of Health Sciences, University of Leeds.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Hospital competition; market structure; prospective payment; incentive structure;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C21 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Cross-Sectional Models; Spatial Models; Treatment Effect Models
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
    • L1 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance
    • R0 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General

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