【Big Fish】3月8日 Argument203-By Narashy

NarashyUID: 2602795

TOPIC: ARGUMENT203 - The following appeared in a newspaper feature story.
"At the small, nonprofit hospital in the town of Saluda, the average length of a patient's stay is two days; at the large, for-profit hospital in the nearby city of Megaville, the average patient stay is six days. Also, the cure rate among patients in the Saluda hospital is about twice that of the Megaville hospital. The Saluda hospital has more employees per patient than the hospital in Megaville, and there are few complaints about service at the local hospital. Such data indicate that treatment in smaller, nonprofit hospitals is more economical and of better quality than treatment in larger, for-profit hospitals."
WORDS: 442          TIME: 00:30:00          DATE: 2010-3-8 10:16:57

In this argument, the author comes to the conclusion that nonprofit hospitals are prefered to for-profit hospitals due to their higher cure rate, less time of stay and less complaints that mentioned in the arguement. Although appealing at first glance, the arguments rests on a series unsubstantiated assumptions which make it unconvincing as it stands.

First of all, the author fails to provide concrete information about the nonprofit and for-profit hospitals. Are they located at the same place or nearby? What's the medical quality of each hospital and on which topics they specilize? Without awaring of these details, it is too arbitrary to make conclusions. It is entirely possible that the two the non-profit hospitals majorly take care of cold, fever and headache while the for-profit one is able to provide operations or even more techniqual ones such as organ replacing due to their modern and high-educated doctors. For the same reason, long time of stay is not reliable to reflect the better quality of non-profit hospitals.

Secondly, the evidence that the author presents is not sufficient to support his/her conclusion. The author claims that the non-profit hospitals posseses a high cure rate but fails to show the total number of the patients and the category of the sick. If people in the non-profit one have a bad cold while the one in for-profit hospitals get cancer, of course the non-profit one is likely to get a cure rate which is a unfair statistic while comparing these two hospitals. Similarly, neither could the number of employees and complaints reveal the quality of the hospitals. A large number of employees will possibly leads to low efficiency in administration while more complaits in the for-profit one is mainly due to the large number of patients. The rate of complaits might be an better statistic to measure the satisfaction of patients.

In addtion, there are other alternatives that the author should have taken into account to reinforce his conclusion. Although non-profit hospital seems economical, can its employees always work full-time without any pay? Even if the assumption the the non-profit one provide better quality is true, which is completely unwarranted, can it deal with some serious sick and posseses enough space for large number of patients? Further analyses and investigations should be conducted on such issues before making conclusion.

To sum up, the author's claim on the superior of non-profit hostpital is not well-supported. To reinforce his recommendation, the author should provide more cogent evidence like the kinds of sick each hospital can deal with and the number of modern equipment. To better evaluate the recommendation,  other information such the complaits rate should be provided.