Comparison of Commercial Negotiated Price and Cash Price between Physician-Owned Hospitals and Other Hospitals in the Same Hospital Referral Region

Abstract

Understanding how physicians' ownership of hospitals affects patients and payers is an important research area. Prior research has focused on differences in quality between physician-owned hospitals (POHs) and other hospitals. To our knowledge, no research has examined whether POHs have different prices than their competitors. We hypothesized that POHs would have higher prices than their competitors and examined this hypothesis using information available through the Hospital Price Transparency Rule.