Residents' willingness-to-pay for attributes of rural health care facilities.

Context: As today's rural hospitals have struggled with financial sustainability for the past 2 decades, it is critical to understand their value relative to alternatives, such as rural health clinics and private practices.

Purpose: To estimate the willingness-to-pay for specific attributes of rural health care facilities in rural Kentucky to determine which services and operational characteristics are most valued by rural residents.

Methodology: We fitted choice experiment data from 769 respondents in 10 rural Kentucky counties to a conditional logit model and used the results to estimate willingness-to-pay for attributes in several categories, including hours open, types of insurance accepted, and availability of health care professionals and specialized care.