Year of Award

2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

Master of Arts (MA)

Degree Name

Economics

Department or School/College

College of Humanities and Sciences

Committee Chair

Jeff Bookwalter

Commitee Members

Amanda Dawsey, Lauren McKeague

Keywords

healthcare, CON, hospital

Subject Categories

Health Economics | Industrial Organization

Abstract

Certificate of need (CON) laws are regulations that require healthcare facilities to seek permission from a state government board to enter a market or expand/modify their established business. Proponents of CON laws claim that, among other things, CON laws protect hospitals and other healthcare providers from competition, allowing them to charge private or fully insured patients more in order to use the profits to “cross-subsidize” free care for low-income and uninsured patients. By employing an unbalanced panel dataset on hospital cost reports for the years 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2019, this study finds that there is no strong evidence that CON laws induce private, short-term hospitals to increase their provision of uncompensated care. However, the results highlight that hospitals respond to the amount of need in their community, with Medicaid expansion and lower uninsured rates being strongly associated with lower uncompensated care provisions for both nonprofit and for-profit hospitals.

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© Copyright 2025 Connor Anthony Mostek