On the estimation of hospital cost: the approach

There has been a huge interest during the last decade on modelling hospital cost. Now that there is a fare amount of clarity achieved in estimating cost functions of hospitals, it is time to take stock of the existing methodologies. This article through a brief review of the past studies attempts to bring to light the issues and methodology related to cost estimation in health care provision, keeping in mind the increasing interest towards health insurance in developing countries. These include problems related to output measurement, definition of input prices and definition of cost and its components. The focus of the review is more on the statistical cost functions than on the accounting based cost calculations.hospital cost; cost estimation; multiproduct analysis

Static near-horizon geometries in five dimensions

We consider the classification of static near-horizon geometries of stationary extremal (not necessarily BPS) black hole solutions of five dimensional Einstein-Maxwell theory coupled to a Chern-Simons term with coupling xi (with xi=1 corresponding to supergravity). Assuming the black holes have two rotational symmetries, we show that their near-horizon geometries are either the direct product AdS_3 X S^2 or a warped product of AdS_2 and compact 3d space. In the AdS_2 case we are able to classify all possible near-horizon geometries with no magnetic fields. There are two such solutions: the direct product AdS_2 X S^3 as well as a warped product of AdS_2 and an inhomogeneous S^3. The latter solution turns out to be near-horizon limit of an extremal Reissner-Nordstrom black hole in an external electric field. In the AdS_2 case with magnetic fields, we reduce the problem (in all cases) to a single non-linear ODE. We show that if there are any purely magnetic solutions of this kind they must have S^1 X S^2 horizon topology, and for xi^2 <1/4 we find examples of solutions with both electric and magnetic fields.Comment: Latex, 28 pages. v2: minor changes, reference adde