A s we have written elsewhere, 1 some aspects of life are too precious, intimate or corruptible to entrust to the market. We prohibit selling kidneys and buying wives or judges. But the market has unquestionably gained new territory in recent years, as more and more activities previously performed by government or nonprofit agencies — including interrogating Iraqi prisoners — have been turned o...

This paper investigates cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals. More specifically, it deals with the question how hospital efficiency varies with ownership, patient structure, and other exogenous factors, which are neither inputs nor outputs of the production process. We conduct a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) on a multifaceted administrative German dataset combined with the balanc...

This paper investigates cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals. More specifically, it deals with the question how hospital efficiency varies with ownership, patient structure, and other exogenous factors, which are neither inputs nor outputs of the production process. We conduct a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) on a multifaceted administrative German dataset combined with the balanc...

Evaluating the Effect of Ownership Status on Hospital Quality: The Key Role of Innovative Procedures Mortality differences between university, non-teaching public and for-profit hospitals are investigated using a French exhaustive administrative dataset on patients admitted for heart attack. Our results show that innovative procedures play a key role in explaining the effect of ownership status...

This study evaluated the productivity of non-profit hospitals in the USA in applying DEA-base Malmquist productivity Change index, decomposed into technical efficiency change index and technical progressive change index. Data used for this analysis consisted of 118 non-profit hospital utilization data and financial statements from 1993 through 2003. DEA-based Malmquist was conducted to measure ...

A survey by the Institute of Medicine examined both factual matters and value questions connected with the provision of health care by investor-owned, for-profit hospitals. One inference drawn from the study data is that for-profit enterprise is not as bad as it has been portrayed. Costs at for-profit institutions are greater than at other hospitals. However, the recently implemented system ...

This article examines the investment of patient care information technology (IT) systems by a nationwide sample of U.S. short-term acute care hospitals and the resulting impact these systems have in the productivity of institutions from 1990-1998. Of particular interest is the extent to which for-profit and not-for-profit hospitals obtain different results from the adoption of lT systems. We fi...

This dissertation examines debt ratios, profitability, and commercial activity of the following hospitals: (i) for-profit hospitals [FP hospitals], (ii) nonprofit hospitals engaging in joint ventures [JV NP hospitals], and (iii) nonprofit hospitals that do not engage in joint ventures [Non-JV NP hospitals]. Financial variables are measured using Form 990 tax return data of nonprofit hospitals a...

This paper investigates whether earnings management occurs in non-profit hospitals. Using manually collected financial data of the foundation hospitals in Taiwan over the period from 2006 to 2008, I find non-profit hospitals tend to manage earnings to a range just above zero by examining the distribution of reported income on a sample of 45 hospitals and 133 hospital-year observations. The stud...

Sweden and Spain experiment with different provider models to reform healthcare provision. Both models have in common that they extend the role of the for-profit sector in healthcare. As the analysis of Saltman and Duran demonstrates, privatisation is an ambiguous and contested strategy that is used for quite different purposes. In our comment, we emphasize that their analysis leaves questions ...