In our paper, we attempt to connect Kornai's soft budget constraint concept with the
methodology used in financial option pricing. To our knowledge, this approach is unprecedented
in the literature. Due to the option pricing framework, the effects of bailouts are
not described as individual, socio-economic phenomena, but as statistical ones. We
show how Markov chains and Monte Carlo simulation can be used in answering some questions
arising in connection with hospitals' bailouts. Our results suggest that in case of
more institutions, the effectiveness of the bailouts depends primary on how much the
liquidity and bankruptcy processes of the hospitals are correlated and not on the
division of the bailouts among them.
