Short‐term fluctuations in hospital demand: implications for admission, discharge, and discriminatory behavior
分析医院在需求高峰日因容量受限时的入院和出院决策，发现医院主要通过加快出院而非限制入院来调配容量，且未发现对医疗补助患者的歧视。
We analyze admission and discharge decisions when hospitals become capacity constrained on high‐demand days, and develop a test for discrimination that, under certain circumstances, does not require controls for differences across patient groups. On high‐demand days, patients are discharged earlier than expected compared to those discharged on low‐demand days. High demand creates no statistically significant differences in hospitals' admission behavior. Thus, hospitals appear to ration capacity by hastening discharges rather than by restricting admissions. We could not reject a null hypothesis of no discrimination against Medicaid patients in discharges.