Footnote:
In: Seoul Journal of Economics, Vol. 34, No. 2, 2021
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments May 30, 2021 erstellt
Description:
Japan has one of the longest average length of stay in hospital (ALOS) among developed countries. To curb the high ALOS, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has launched a payment system reform where instead of the pre-reform fee-for-service system (FFS) a new per-diem prospective payment system (DPC/PDPS) has been gradually adopted. We develop a theoretical framework to model hospitals’ incentives under different payment systems and to study the impact of the reform on the ALOS. We show that hospitals with a longer (shorter) pre-reform ALOS shorten (lengthen) their post-reform ALOS. Furthermore, hospitals with longer prereform ALOS have stronger incentives to use planned readmission to decrease the post-reform length of stay associated with a single admission. The theoretical predictions of our model match empirical evidence from the literature