Information and Disparities in Health Care Quality: Evidence from GP Choice in England

Low-income patients tend to receive lower quality health care. They have limited access to high quality options and—even conditional on access—are less likely to choose high performing providers. We show that differential information about provider quality is an important determinant of this disparity. Our empirical strategy exploits the temporary presence of a website that publicly displayed summary star ratings of general practitioner (GP) offices in England. Regression discontinuity (RD) estimates show that, on average, patients respond sharply to the information on the website, and that this response is almost entirely driven by residents of low-income neighborhoods. We incorporate our RD moments into a structural model of demand that allows for heterogeneity in information in addition to consumer inertia and heterogeneous preferences. Our results indicate that a meaningful fraction of the income-quality gradient could be eliminated by removing informational differences.