DATA
While inferences made from hospital data for a time prior to the introduction
of the Medicare prospective payment system may be irrelevant
today (Fitzgerald and Jacobsen 1987), we chose to use data from that
same time period (1982) to achieve a degree of comparability between
our study and that of Herzlinger and Krasker. Data for our analyses
came from the 1982 American Hospital Association (AHA) Annual
Survey of Hospitals. A total of 5,802 general, short-term, nonfederal,
community hospitals comprised the AHA data set; 3,783 of these were
for-profit or not-for-profit voluntary hospitals for which there were
usable data for our study. Additional data on the hospital systems with
which some hospitals were affiliated were obtained from the 1982
Multihospital System Parent Corporation data set. Data on local labor
rates were obtained from the Federal Register. Unlike the sample used by
Herzlinger and Krasker, our total study group included system and
nonsystem hospitals.