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  • 2020
  • Working Paper

Hospital Allocation and Racial Disparities in Health Care

By: Amitabh Chandra, Pragya Kakani and Adam Sacarny
  • Format:Print
  • | Language:English
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Abstract

We develop a simple framework to measure the role of hospital allocation in racial disparities in health care and use it to study Black and white Medicare patients who are treated for heart attacks—a condition where virtually everyone receives care, hospital care is highly effective, and hospital quality has been validated. We report four facts. (1) Black patients receive care at lower-performing hospitals than white patients, even when they live in the same hospital market or ZIP code within a hospital market. (2) Over the past two decades, the gap in performance between hospitals treating Black and white patients shrank by over two-thirds. (3) This progress is due to more rapid performance improvement at hospitals that tended to treat Black patients, rather than faster reallocation of Black patients to better hospitals. (4) Hospital performance improvement is correlated with adoption of a high-return low-cost input, beta-blockers. Closing remaining disparities in allocation and harnessing the forces of performance improvement, including technology diffusion, may be novel levers to further reduce disparities.

Keywords

Health Care And Treatment; Equality And Inequality; Race; Analysis

Citation

Chandra, Amitabh, Pragya Kakani, and Adam Sacarny. "Hospital Allocation and Racial Disparities in Health Care." NBER Working Paper Series, No. 28018, November 2020.
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About The Author

Amitabh Chandra

Technology and Operations Management
→More Publications

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More from the Authors
  • Value-Based Insurance Design at Onex By: Joshua Schwartzstein, Amitabh Chandra and Amram Migdal
  • What Values and Priorities Mean for Health Reform By: Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra
  • Pricing the Priceless: Covering Transformational Medicines at Harvard Pilgrim Health Plan By: Amitabh Chandra and Sofia Guerra
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