Sharing arrangements in the nonprofit hospital industry.

The major task of this paper is to develop hypotheses about voluntary sharing arrangements (SAs) from a plausible economic analysis of the hospital industry. The second task of the paper is to review some emerging evidence about SAs. Our research suggests that some SAs could or actually do reduce hospital costs to the community. However, there are reasons which indicate that cost reduction is neither a necessary nor a sufficient result for the success of many SAs.