Analysis of the Economic Incentives of Case-Mix Hospital Reimbursement. Executive Summary

摘要

The study indicates methods by which to eliminate two artifacts of Medicare's reimbursement system. It examines the methods used to calculate payments under Medicare and demonstrates the mathematical basis for the bias introduced by the use of labor market indexation and hospital-weighted averages. The empirical analyses demonstrates that the magnitude of the hospital-weighting bias is relatively small and that the redistributive effects of the indexation bias are small. The empirical analysis suggests that the redistributive effects of omitted-variables bias may be quite substantial.