Uncompensated care: hospitals' responses to fiscal pressures.

This Data Watch examines the impact of hospital competition, the Medicare prospective payment system (PPS), and Medi-Cal selective contracting on the provision of uncompensated care by private hospitals in California during 1980-1989. It finds that hospitals subject to more intense competition and greater fiscal pressure from Medicare and Medi-Cal reduced their provision of uncompensated care relative to hospitals facing less pressure from these sources. We estimate that had hospitals not been subjected to increasing price competition from growth of managed care plans and financial tightening in public programs, they would have provided 36 percent more uncompensated care than was actually provided in 1989.