Stat of the Week: Hospitials as Hotels

According to a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research

"We also find that a one-standard-deviation increase in amenities raises a hospital's demand by 38.4% on average, whereas demand is substantially less responsive to clinical quality as measured by pneumonia mortality."

-It's interesting they used pneumonia mortality as a measure of clinical quality. I can only read the abstract, but I would assume that they adjusted for confounders and such like a good epidemiologist would do.

Stat of the Week: Health Care Costs

According to 2005 Paul Krugman article at the New York Times:

The following is per capita spending on Health Care

United States: $5,267 on health care/ $2,364 is government spending.
Canada: $2,931 on health care / $2,048 is government spending.
France: $2,736 on health care / $2,080 is government spending.

It's amazing how high our health care spending is. Hard to believe that our government spending on health care (medicare, medicaid, etc) is more than Canada and France's govt spending! My thoughts are that the biggest faults are the administrative costs that come with our insurance system. However I'm starting to believe that United States does not evaluate health decisions correctly, for instance over-emphasizing screening that does not extend or improve lives. More on this later, but as you can see in the following graph...yeah it's a problem.

Stat of the Week: Life Expectancies in Baltimore

20-year life gap separates city's poorest, wealthy

"In West Baltimore's impoverished Hollins Market neighborhood, where the average life expectancy is about 63 years...Across town in wealthy Roland Park, where residents live on average to be 83"

It's crazy how great the dispairites are between two locations within a few miles of each other. Infant mortality and violence are probably the biggest contributors to this difference.

Stat of the Week

Johns Hopkins study - number of deaths in Iraq

• Estimated 654,965 additional deaths in Iraq between March 2003 and July 2006

Now over 1 million?

Stat of the Week

According to the New Yorker:

"By far the biggest theft problem faced by retailers, however, is employee theft, which accounts for nearly 47% of profit erosion."

(from a 2005 Florida Study - companies lost 1.61 percent of sales to theft or fraud)

I am naive about this subject, but I feel it would be more cost effective on preventing this rather than shoplifters (who make up 33 percent of this sample). You have to consider the negative consequences of attempting to prevent customers from shoplifting like false positives (angry customers leading to lost businness, lawsuits/punitive damges). An earlier version of the study states: "While the average shoplifting incident costs the retailer $212.68, an employee theft averages $1,058.20 per incident."

Thoughts:
Investigate Employee Crime more
Replace employees with self-check out machines/robots in the future?