Hospital-Wide Cost-to-Charge Conversion and Within-DRG Distributional Compression: A Descriptive Measurement Study Using Medicare Inpatient Data — Replication Package

This deposit is the replication package for the paper "Hospital-Wide Cost-to-Charge Conversion and Within-DRG Distributional Compression: A Descriptive Measurement Study Using Medicare Inpatient Data" (International Journal of Health Economics and Management). The study measures the empirical consequences of converting Medicare inpatient charges to estimated costs using a hospital-wide cost-to-charge ratio (CCR). It uses the CMS Medicare Inpatient Hospitals by Provider and Service Public Use File for 2013 to 2024, and summarises the effect with a compression diagnostic, lambda. Contents. The package contains the cleaned analytical panel (1,868,953 hospital-DRG-year observations across 195 DRGs and 3,456 hospitals), the complete Python pipeline that regenerates every reported number, all generated result tables as machine-readable CSV, a results workbook, and integrity checks. Pipeline. The analysis has two stages. Stage one constructs the annual CCR extracts from the fiscal-year IPPS Impact Files; the Impact Files are not redistributed here but are mirrored by the NBER Public Use Data Archive (DOI 10.60592/r1gg-ma38), and the deposit includes the scripts that download them, verify checksums, and rebuild each extract (fetch_and_checksum.py, build_ccr_from_impact.py, impact_file_source_audit.py). Stage two regenerates all downstream results from the bundled cleaned panel via run_all.py, and is verified inside the deposit by pre-deposit consistency checks, an archive self-verification test, and a clean-build test that rebuilds every output and compares it to reference values. Table-to-script provenance is documented in MANIFEST.md; data sources are catalogued in CMS_SOURCE_LINKS.md. Data note. Only public CMS data are used; no restricted or licensed data are included. The converted quantity in the paper is a CCR-derived cost proxy, not an observation of true cost. License: CC-BY-4.0.