| dc.description.abstract | This paper analyses the relationship of hospital ownership and health outcome on liver cancer patients in Taiwan. We use the National Health Insurance Bureau claims data from 1996 to 2007. According to the claim data, we extract the hospital characteristics like hospital accreditation, ownership status, and hospital location and demographic covariates such as patient’s gender, age, income, and health status as condition for the following process. Then we use one-month, six-month and one-year mortality rates as index to measure patient’s health outcome. Because patients may select admitted hospital based on their illness severity, we employ the two-stage least square model to account for this problem. And the instrument variables we use in this paper are the following four, the nearest distance to public hospital, the nearest distance to nonprofit hospital, male population by county and treating liver cancer patients’ hospital numbers by county. From the results of two-stage least square model estimation, compare to for-profit hospital, either public hospital or nonprofit hospital, we find that there is no significant influence on one-month, six-month and one-year mortality rates in statics. Based on the static result above, we will make a conclusion that the health outcome is affected by patient’s illness severity more than hospital care does.
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