Table 3—
Regression Estimates of Medicare Expenditures
| Combined sample: PCPs and cardiologists | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Medicare spending in last two years of life (columns 1–6) | Overall (7) | ||||||
| (1) | (2) | (3) | (4) | (5) | (6) | ||
| Cowboy physician share | 0.822 (0.196) | 0.676 (0.143) | 0.675 (0.131) | 0.684 (0.132) | 0.685 (0.123) | 0.904 (0.182) | |
| Comforter physician share | −0.315 (0.144) | −0.200 (0.098) | −0.175 (0.098) | −0.161 (0.099) | −0.151 (0.096) | −0.274 (0.136) | |
| High follow-up physician share | 1.060 (0.176) | 0.964 (0.172) | 1.033 (0.165) | 0.917 (0.166) | 1.066 (0.215) | ||
| Low follow-up physician share | −0.307 (0.220) | −0.289 (0.217) | −0.402 (0.263) | −0.345 (0.239) | −0.673 (0.289) | ||
| Have unneeded tests patient share | 0.297 (0.176) | 0.351 (0.193) | 0.500 (0.255) | 0.421 (0.239) | |||
| See unneeded cardiologist patient share | 0.150 (0.129) | 0.132 (0.130) | 0.543 (0.260) | −0.079 (0.151) | |||
| Aggressive patient preferences share | −0.427 (0.408) | −0.294 (0.379) | −0.021 (0.518) | −0.695 (0.404) | |||
| Comfort patient preferences share | −0.237 (0.137) | −0.282 (0.144) | −0.426 (0.217) | −0.639 (0.173) | |||
| Observations | 74 | 74 | 74 | 74 | 74 | 74 | 74 |
| R2 | 0.356 | 0.619 | 0.644 | 0.634 | 0.662 | 0.203 | 0.623 |
Notes: Two-year end-of-life spending (outcome in columns 1–6) and overall spending (outcome in column 7) are in natural log form and are price, age, sex, and race adjusted. Results shown are for the 74 Hospital Referral Regions (HRRs) with survey responses for at least three patients, one primary care physician, and three cardiologists. All regressions include a constant, control for the fraction of primary care physicians in the sample, and are robust to controlling for percent black and percent poverty at the HRR level. Survey sampling weights take into account differences in the number of physician observations per HRR.