@article{7950fbbff23f4316be8a9fe1ecac31c8,
title = "Ambulance Taxis: The Impact of Regulation and Litigation on Health-Care Fraud",
abstract = "We study the effectiveness of pay-and-chase lawsuits and up-front regulations for combating health-care fraud. Between 2003 and 2017, Medicare spent \$7.7 billion on 37.5 million regularly scheduled ambulance rides for patients traveling to and from dialysis facilities even though many did not satisfy Medicare{\textquoteright}s criteria for receiving reimbursements. Using an identification strategy based on the staggered timing of regulations and lawsuits across the United States, we find that adding a prior authorization requirement for ambulance reimbursements reduced spending much more than pursuing criminal and civil litigation did on their own. We find no evidence that prior authorization affected patients{\textquoteright} health.",
author = "Paul Eliason and Riley League and Jetson Leder-Luis and McDevitt, \{Ryan C.\} and Roberts, \{James W.\}",
note = "We thank Zarek Brot-Goldberg, Josh Gottlieb, Tal Gross, Jonathan Gruber, Atul Gupta, Ben Handel, Steven Medema, Matt Notowidigdo, David Ridley, Andrei Shleifer, Jonathan Skinner, Becky Staiger, Juan Carlos Suarez Serrato, Daniel Xu, and participants of the 2021 conference of the American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon), the 2021 National Bureau of Economic Research Public Economics and Health Economics Program Meetings, the Harvard{\textendash}Massachusetts Institute of Technology{\textendash}Boston University Health Economics Seminar, and the University of Chicago Health Economics Workshop for their helpful feedback. We also thank Paul Kaufman for very helpful discussions about this industry. Evan Henley, Qi Xuan Khoo, Yicheng Liu, Mingrui Ma, Heather Wong, Baiden Wright, and Peck Yang provided excellent research assistance. The data reported here have been supplied by the United States Renal Data System (USRDS). The interpretation and reporting of these data are the responsibility of the authors and in no way should be seen as an official policy or interpretation of the US government. Data were also provided by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health (award nos. P30AG012810 and T32-AG000186). This manuscript was edited by John Asker.",
year = "2025",
month = may,
doi = "10.1086/734134",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "133",
pages = "1661--1702",
journal = "Journal of Political Economy",
issn = "0022-3808",
publisher = "University of Chicago Press",
number = "5",
}