TY - JOUR AU - McClellan, Mark AU - Staiger, Douglas TI - Comparing Hospital Quality at For-Profit and Not-for-Profit Hospitals JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 7324 PY - 1999 Y2 - August 1999 DO - 10.3386/w7324 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7324 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7324.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Mark B. McClellan Director, Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy Robert J. Margolis MD Professor of Business, Medicine and Policy 100 Fuqua Drive Box 90120 Durham, NC 27708 Tel: 919.660.7963 Fax: NA E-Mail: mark.mcclellan@duke.edu Douglas O. Staiger Dartmouth College Department of Economics HB6106, 301 Rockefeller Hall Hanover, NH 03755-3514 Tel: 603/646-2979 Fax: 603/646-2122 E-Mail: douglas.staiger@dartmouth.edu M1 - published as Mark B. McClellan, Douglas O. Staiger. "Comparing Hospital Quality at For-Profit and Not- for-Profit Hospitals," in David M. Cutler, editor, "The Changing Hospital Industry: Comparing Not-for-Profit and For-Profit Institutions" University of Chicago Press (2000) AB - Do not-for-profit hospitals provide better care than for-profit hospitals? We compare patient outcomes in for-profit and not-for-profit hospitals between 1984 and 1994 using a new method for estimating differences across hospitals that yields far more accurate estimates of hospital quality than previously available. We find that, on average, for-profit hospitals have higher mortality among elderly patients with heart disease, and that this difference has grown over the last decade. However, much of the difference appears to be associated with the location of for-profit hospitals. Within specific markets, for-profit ownership appears if anything to be associated with better quality care. Moreover, the small average difference in mortality between for-profit and not-for-profit hospitals masks an enormous amount of variation in mortality within each of these ownership types. Overall, these results suggest that factors other than for-profit status per se may be the main determinants of quality of care in hospitals. ER -