The Effect of Case Mix on Hospital Costs—Evidence from Queensland

Abstract

This chapter reports the empirical results from an analysis of the effects of case mix on hospital costs using data on Queensland public hospitals. Section 5.2 explains the specification of the multiproduct cost function adopted for this analysis—a non joint, input-output separable average cost function with overall constant returns to scale. A description of the data sources is provided in Section 5.3 with some descriptive statistics being presented in Section 5.4. The results are presented in Section 5.5. The closing section of the chapter provides a summary and conclusions.