Chart of the Day: The Effect of a Hurricane on Health Care Utilization
Tatyana Deryugina visited the Census last week and presented her paper “Natural Disasters and Elective Medical Services: How Big is the Bounce-Back?” with Jonathan Gruber and Adrienne Sabety. My chart of the day is Figure 3 from the paper, showing the results in the form of an event study around the date of the hurricane. They find a sharp decrease in elective procedures around the date of the hurricane, particularly for strong hurricanes.
Specifically, they find that elective services fall by around 7% in the month of event for all hurricanes, and 26% in severe hurricanes. While the rates recover to pre-disaster levels pretty quickly, it takes a year or more to recover the lost revenue. This is important when some hospitals are operating on tight margins, depending on the high-margin elective services to support the lower margin emergency services they provide.
The working paper came out in July 2020, framed with respect to the vary salient pandemic disaster. But Tatyana also discussed the importance with respect to disaster relief during the seminar, which seemed like the closer context with which to understand the results. Small, rural hospitals may need extra support post-disaster to prevent bankruptcy and closure, given the long term effect of this short term shock to the use of their services.