A note on the trade‐off between waiting times and quality in a constrained hospital market
研究了在满负荷运行的医院市场中，等待时间与医疗质量之间的权衡关系，发现当医院不希望患者等待时，等待时间政策可能以降低医疗质量为代价实现目标。
While aging population and technological innovation are expected to increase healthcare demand in the future, increase in healthcare spending is not likely to be sustainable in times of fiscal constraint. This might lead to a tightening of hospital capacity and, potentially, to higher patient waiting times. This paper studies waiting times and quality in a healthcare market where semi-altruistic hospitals operate at full capacity. We show that in this context a trade-off between waiting times and quality emerges which, if hospitals dislike patients to wait, decreases the incentive for the quality of care. We also show that, when hospitals operate at full capacity, standard waiting time policies involving targets and penalties (e.g., "Targets and Terror" in England) can meet the target at the expense of a lower quality of care, with relevant implications for the empirical evaluation of waiting time policy.