Article
Heterogeneous Impact of Geographic Barriers on Provider Choice Evidence from New York County’s Health Market*
Jae Bok Lee1, Chul-Young Roh2, Jonathan A Woolley3
Author Information & Copyright ▼
1Jae Bok Lee, is a visiting research fellow at the Korea Institute of Public Administration. E-mail:
jaebok@kipa.re.kr.
2Chul-Young Roh is an associate professor in the Health Services Administration Program, Department of Health Sciences, at Lehman College/City University of New York. E-mail:
chulyoung.roh@lehman.cuny.edu.
3Jonathan A Woolley is a PhD candidate in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University-Newark. E-mail:
jwoolley@scarletmail.rutgers.edu.
© Copyright 2018 Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Received: Sep 13, 2018; Revised: Sep 23, 2018; Revised: Dec 14, 2018; Accepted: Dec 17, 2018
Published Online: Dec 31, 2018
Abstract
Health services should be accessible regardless of citizens’ gender, age, race, or insurance type, and geographic barriers should not interfere with this access. This article aims to assess the heterogeneous impacts of geographic barriers on inpatients’ hospital choices and to examine whether they vary according inpatients’ socioeconomic or insurance status. Using data on providers and inpatients obtained from the New York State Bureau of Health Informatics Office of Quality and Patient Safety for New York County (New York City’s borough of Manhattan) for 2009, we employed a discrete choice model. Our findings reveal that geographic barriers limit inpatients’ choices of hospitals more when they are of low socioeconomic status.
Keywords: hospital choice; geographic accessibility; access barrier; socioeconomic disparities
