政策制定中的行业意见：来自美国联邦医疗保险的证据*

中文摘要

美国联邦医疗保险（Medicare）在制定医生服务价格时，会征求一个负责评估行业提案的委员会的意见。该委员会本身由行业成员组成；我们考察这种安排是否会导致监管俘获，使价格偏向行业利益。我们发现，衡量委员会与提案者之间关联度的一项指标增加一个标准差，会使价格提高10%。随后，我们评估：如果更高的关联度使委员会能够获取监管所需的信息，那么让一个存在偏向的委员会担任中介是否仍可能是可取的。我们发现，与委员会关联度更高的行业提案者在提案中提供的硬证据更少。然而，在软信息方面，我们发现了存在权衡的证据：私人保险公司制定的价格更紧密地跟随在较高关联度下形成的Medicare价格。

Abstract

Abstract In setting prices for physician services, Medicare solicits input from a committee that evaluates proposals from industry. The committee itself comprises members from industry; we investigate whether this arrangement leads to regulatory capture with prices biased toward industry interests. We find that increasing a measure of affiliation between the committee and proposers by one standard deviation increases prices by 10%. We then evaluate whether employing a biased committee as an intermediary may nonetheless be desirable, if greater affiliation allows the committee to extract information needed for regulation. We find industry proposers more affiliated with the committee produce less hard evidence in their proposals. However, on soft information, we find evidence of a trade-off: private insurers set prices that more closely track Medicare prices generated under higher affiliation.