The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA

Abstract #57692

Stephen H. Linder, PhD and Pauline Vaillancourt Rosenau, PhD. Department of Management and Policy Sciences, School of Public Health - University of Texas - Health Science Center, 1200 Herman Pressler, P.O. Box 20186, Houston, TX 77225, (713) 500-9494, slinder@sph.uth.tmc.edu

Objectives: To determine, by way of a systematic and comprehensive review of relevant studies, whether there is a scientific consensus on performance differences between private for-profit and private nonprofit providers of long-term health care. A second objective is to compare these findings with differences for other types of healthcare providers. Data Sources: Computerized bibliographic searches for peer-reviewed articles on relative performance are undertaken. Follow-up searches of reference lists in each relevant article are then completed. Methods: Analysis includes all published, peer-reviewed studies that compare the performance of for-profit and nonprofit health care providers, including nursing home facilities, on access, quality, cost/efficiency, and/or amount of charity care, and rely on quantitative data collected after 1980. Each study’s conclusions are coded for whether they report: for-profit superiority, nonprofit superiority, or no difference/mixed results. Results: Our previous analyses found that nonprofit providers, generally, are judged to perform as well or better than their for-profit counterparts on quality, access, cost, and the amount of charity care provided. Conclusion: To the extent that superior performance on access, quality, cost/efficiency or amount of charity care is considered important, our results suggest that caution is warranted on public policy developments that support the current trend favoring for-profit provision of these health services in the U.S.

Learning Objectives:

• At the conclusion of this session, the participant (learner) will be able to: summarize the findings from over 20 years of research on whether for-profit providers are superior to nonprofit providers on 4 key performance criteria; understand how performance of providers has been measured in the literature; be able to compare nursing homes with other kinds of providers in terms of the relative performance of for-profit and nonprofit organizations.

Keywords: Nursing Homes, Privatization

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.