Health Care Exceptionalism? Performance and Allocation in the US Health Care Sector

The conventional wisdom for the health care sector is that idiosyncratic features leave little scope for market forces to allocate consumers to higher performance producers. However, we find robust evidence across several different conditions and performance measures that higher quality hospitals have higher market shares and grow more over time. The relationship between performance and allocation is stronger among patients who have greater scope for hospital choice, suggesting that patient demand plays an important role in allocation. Our findings suggest that health care may have more in common with traditional sectors subject to market forces than often assumed.