The Price Ain't Right? Hospital Prices and Health Spending on the Privately Insured

Zack Cooper, Stuart V. Craig, Martin Gaynor, John Van Reenen

NBER Working Paper No. 21815
Issued in December 2015, Revised in May 2018

---- Acknowledgments ----

This paper drew inspiration from the work of Uwe Reinhardt. Professor Reinhardt passed away in December 2017 and we dedicate this paper to his memory. We are grateful for comments and suggestions that substantially improved the paper from the editors (Larry Katz and Andrei Shleifer), five anonymous referees, participants at multiple seminars, and Leemore Dafny, Matthew Fiedler, Joshua Gottlieb, Neale Mahoney, Fiona Scott Morton, Aviv Nevo, and Jonathan Skinner. This project received financial support from the Commonwealth Fund, the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number P30AG012810. We acknowledge the assistance of the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) and its data contributors, Aetna, Humana, and United Healthcare, in providing the data analyzed in this study. The data used in this paper can be accessed with permission from HCCI. We thank Jennifer Wu, Nathan Shekita, Charles Gray, Austin Jaspers, Nina Russell, Darien Lee, Eugene Larsen-Hallock, and Christina Ramsay for outstanding research assistance. The opinions expressed in this paper and any errors are those of the authors alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. More details on our analysis can be found online at www.healthcarepricingproject.org.

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