Scale and scope efficiencies through hospital consolidations

The hospital sector in the Province of Ontario has recently completed a large scale restructuring marked by wide ranging hospital closures, mergers and program transfers. Given a generally inconclusive economics literature, regulators used an accounting, as opposed to an economic, approach when predicting gains to consolidations. This paper uses an economic cost function to examine economies of scale and scope in the years preceding restructuring, where there was little doubt that economies were possible. Issues relating to output aggregation, functional form, and scale and scope testing are addressed and an equilibrium cost function is derived from an estimated short run function to measure the cost concepts of interest. Using index and direct approaches, we examine a variety of potential reconfigurations and conclude that there were indeed large scale unexploited gains to strategic consolidation in the hospital sector. Furthermore, these gains may not have been detected using standard approaches in the literature.