TY - BOOK ID - 137059302 TI - How Much Uncompensated Care do Doctors Provide? AU - Gruber, Jonathan. AU - Rodriguez, David. AU - National Bureau of Economic Research. PY - 2007 PB - Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research DB - UniCat UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:137059302 AB - The magnitude of provider uncompensated care has become an important public policy issue. Yet existing measures of uncompensated care are flawed because they compare uninsured payments to list prices, not to the prices actually paid by the insured. We address this issue using a novel source of data from a vendor that processes financial data for almost 4000 physicians. We measure uncompensated care as the net amount that physicians lose by lower payments from the uninsured than from the insured. Our best estimate is that physicians provide negative uncompensated care to the uninsured, earning more on uninsured patients than on insured patients with comparable treatments. Even our most conservative estimates suggest that uncompensated care amounts to only 0.8% of revenues, or at most $3.2 billion nationally. These results highlight the important distinction between charges and payments, and point to the need for a re-definition of uncompensated care in the health sector going forward. ER -