Costs and Price Competition in California Hospitals, 1980-1990
Published In: Health Affairs, v. 13, no. 4, Fall 1994, p. 118-126
Posted on RAND.org on December 31, 1993
Read More
Access further information on this document at content.healthaffairs.orgThis article was published outside of RAND. The full text of the article can be found at the link above.
Concerns cost and price competition in California hospitals between 1980 and 1990. It explores California's experience with health maintenance and preferred provider organizations, which led to reductions in the growth of hospital costs. It also provides analyses to show that reductions of hospital costs were larger in competitive markets and that, if implemented on a national scale, selective contracting could be expected to reduce the growth of hospital costs even more rapidly than occurred in California. This article speaks of competition as a direct strategy for containing costs. However, it concludes that widespread consolidation of hospitals under the guise of increasing efficiency could undercut any possibility for competitive forces constraining providers' behaviors.
This article was published outside of RAND. The full text of the article can be found at the link above.
This report is part of the RAND Corporation external publication series. Many RAND studies are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as chapters in commercial books, or as documents published by other organizations.
The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.