Place, Policy and Parity: Examining and Visualizing Spatial and Socioeconomic Contributions to Hospital Charge Markup

Abstract

This thesis comprises two components. The first is an analysis of the relationship between hospital "retail" price lists as described in charge master lists, normalized to Medicare payments, and socio-economic and demographic covariates of the counties in which facilities are located. This analysis finds that little of the variation in how much hospitals charge the uninsured for services is due to the proportion of the population in a facility’s surrounding county that is uninsured. The second component of the thesis is a description of a data visualization toolkit, the MapSuite package written for R. This code base is designed to facilitate the representation of spatio-temporal data sets. The design philosophy and implementation are described, along with illustrative examples.