The role of hospital networks in individual mortality 24/21 - Working paper

Similar to Medicare Advantage, in- surers compete only on the breadth of their hospital networks, but all other elements of the national insurance plan are regulated by the government, in- cluding premiums, cost-sharing, services, and benefits.2 Our empirical strategy leverages the termination in December 2015 of the largest health insurer in the country, called SaludCoop, and the 38 hospitals whi. [...] We define network overlap as the fraction of hospitals in SaludCoop’s network that are also in the network of the incumbent insurer. [...] (2008) who esti- mate the impact of hospital market power on patient outcomes in the context of the National Health Service in the UK. [...] In column (1) of table 3 we find that increasing network breadth from the first to the third quartile of the distribution, which corresponds roughly to adding 15 providers to the network in the average municipality, reduces mortality by 0.52 per 1,000.17 The reduction in mortality of 0.52 is sizeable given than the national mortality rate in 2015 was 4 per 1,000 excluding violent deaths. [...] The results are very 17We obtain the number of providers by taking the difference between the 75th and the 25th percentiles of network breadth and multiplying this difference by the average number of providers in a municipality.