Health Economics · Applied Econometrics · Microeconomics · Public Policy

Benjamin Park Basow

PhD Candidate
Colorado State University
Department of Economics
College of Liberal Arts

CV

Curriculum Vitae

Head Shot

Research

01

Do Protections Against Surprise Medical Bills Reduce Personal Bankruptcy?

This analysis estimates the effect of surprise balance billing restrictions on personal bankruptcy filings using the implementation of Florida House Bill 221 as a quasi-natural experiment. Enacted in 2016, Florida's House Bill 221 prohibited out of network health providers from balance billing patients for emergency and selected non-emergency services. We combine bankruptcy filing data from the U.S. Courts Bankruptcy Filings Statistics Database with state-level economic and demographic data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and U.S. Census Bureau to construct a balanced panel from 2010 to 2019. Using the classical synthetic control method of Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller (2010), we construct a counterfactual Florida from a weighted combination of donor states that closely reproduces Florida’s pre-treatment bankruptcy trajectory and observed state characteristics. We find that after the implementation of HB 221, Florida saw a significant decline in both total personal bankruptcy and chapter 7 filings relative to its synthetic control state. The classical synthetic control estimates yield an average post-treatment effect of -15.8 percent for total personal bankruptcy and -18.1 percent for chapter 7 bankruptcy. We evaluate the credibility of our classical estimates by preforming a series of robustness checks such as the in-space placebo, in-time placebo, RMSPE-restricted placebo, and pre/post-treatment RMSPE ratio tests following methods cited in Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller (2010, 2015). We further assess sensitivity to pre-treatment imbalance using bias-corrected synthetic control estimators based on OLS, ridge, elastic net, and lasso regression models following Ben-Michael, Feller, and Rothstein (2021) and Wiltshire (2022). Our results suggest that restrictions on balance billing practices may contribute to meaningful reductions in personal bankruptcy filings.

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02

The Impact of the Affordable Care Act on Hospital Revenues and Healthcare Employment

This analysis examines the effects of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion on hospital finances and labor market outcomes, with particular emphasis on rural hospitals. Using hospital level panel data from the RAND Hospital Data File from 2010-2017 and an event study difference-in-differences event study design that accounts for treatment effect heterogeneity, we estimate the causal impact of Medicaid expansion on hospital revenues, operating margins, and employment outcomes. We find that Medicaid expansion led to a positive and statistically significant increase in Medicaid revenues and a corresponding decline in commercial revenues. There were no meaningful changes to total patient revenue or operating margins in the full sample. However, rural hospitals experienced modest but statistically significant improvements in operating margins and gross patient revenue relative to urban hospitals. We find that financial improvements in operating margin and patient revenue translated into specific labor market responses as full-time equivalent employment and paid hours saw significant increases in rural hospitals. While FTE employment and paid hours increased, we found that average wages decreased by approximately 4%, suggesting a shift toward lower-wage healthcare occupations. In contrast, urban hospitals exhibited little to no adjustment in employment or wages following expansion. Our findings highlight the heterogeneous impact of public insurance expansions across healthcare markets and demonstrate that Medicaid expansion played an important role in supporting traditionally vulnerable communities.

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03

Do Surprise Billing Laws Reduce Medical Debt? Evidence from State-Level Reforms

State and federal policies restricting balance billing have been implemented to protect patients from unexpected out-of-network medical charges. While these state laws limit out of pocket costs for patients, they may also impact hospital revenue streams and shift uncompensated care burdens onto healthcare providers. In this analysis we examine whether implementation of balance billing restrictions is associated with changes in hospital bad debt and if these changes were because of changes to high-cost hospital services, particularly ambulance and operating room services. Using hospital financial report and service data from U.S. hospitals, we estimate a difference-in-differences framework comparing hospitals in states adopting balance billing restrictions to states that did not adopt such reforms. Our results indicate that the introduction of balance billing restrictions is associated with an increase in hospital bad debt, suggesting that hospitals find ways to recover revenues lost when balance billing is restricted. We find that the increase in bad debt coincides with an increase in operating costs associated with ambulance services and operating rooms, which are more prone to having higher rates of uncompensated care. These findings contribute to previous literature on surprise billing laws by focusing on potential cost-shifting spillover effects which are internalized though hospital revenue streams. Understanding these distributional effects is important for evaluating the broader financial consequences of balance billing reforms and the sustainability of hospital emergency and surgical service provision.

Working Paper PDF

Teaching

Course Instructor — Resident In Person

TermCourseTitleStudents
Fall 2025ECON/AREC 335Introduction to Econometrics26
Spring 2025ECON/AREC 335Introduction to Econometrics49
Fall 2024ECON/LB 235Working With Data23
Spring 2024ECON/LB 235Working With Data42
Fall 2023ECON/AREC 335Introduction to Econometrics49
Spring 2023ECON/AREC 335Introduction to Econometrics24
Fall 2022ECON 304Intermediate Macroeconomics19

Course Instructor — Online

TermCourseTitleStudents
Fall 2025ECON 335Introduction to Econometrics44
Spring 2025ECON 335Introduction to Econometrics42
Fall 2024ECON 335Introduction to Econometrics30
Summer 2024ECON 320Economics of Public Finance15
Summer 2023ECON 306Intermediate Microeconomics30
Spring 2023ECON 335Introduction to Econometrics30
Fall 2022ECON 101Economics of Social Issues7
Summer 2022ECON 306Intermediate Microeconomics18

Recitation Instructor / Teaching Assistant

TermCourseTitleStudents
Spring 2021ECON 202Principles of Microeconomics52
Fall 2020ECON 202Principles of Microeconomics66
Spring 2020ECON 202Principles of Microeconomics86
Fall 2019ECON 202Principles of Microeconomics84

University Funded Economics Tutor

TermCourseTitleStudents
Summer 2014ECON 202Principles of Microeconomics2
Spring 2014ECON 202/204Principles of Micro/Macroeconomics3

Contact

Benjamin Park Basow

Colorado State University

Department of Economics

C3911 Social Sciences Hall

1771 Campus Delivery

Fort Collins, CO 80523-1771


Email: benjamin.basow@colostate.edu

Phone: 970-631-3095

Personal Website: https://benjaminbasow.github.io/