Consumer Responsiveness to Simple Health Care Prices: Evidence From Tiered Hospital Networks∗
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper shows that consumers price-shop for health care when they can easily assess out-of-pocket prices. Health care cost containment efforts increasingly incentivize price-shopping, despite recent evidence that this does not steer consumers toward lower-priced care. I show that consumers priceshop in the highly simplified price information environment of health insurance plans with tiered hospital networks. These consumers observe a single predictable, well-defined price that applies to a broad range of services within each of at most three tiers of hospitals. The savings from price-shopping are large enough to both compensate for consumer welfare losses and raise in-
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