In health policy, Roemer's Law may be expressed as "in an insured population, a hospital bed built is a bed filled." The rule was deduced by the American health services researcher Milton Roemer, working at the

UCLA School of Public Health The UCLA Jonathan and Karin Fielding School of Public Health is the graduate school of public health at UCLA, and is located within the Center for Health Sciences building on UCLA's campus in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California ...

. Roemer and colleagues found a

positive correlation In statistics, correlation or dependence is any statistical relationship, whether causal or not, between two random variables or bivariate data. Although in the broadest sense, "correlation" may indicate any type of association, in statistics ...

between the number of short-term general hospital beds available per 1,000 population and the number of hospital days used per 1,000 population. Roemer's Law will clearly not always hold true (not every bed that is ever built will be filled), but it provides the underpinning for certificate of need laws and for health planning. The law is thought to be a consequence of

induced demand In economics, induced demand – related to latent demand and generated demandSchneider, Benjamin (September 6, 2018"CityLab University: Induced Demand"''CityLab'' – is the phenomenon whereby an increase in supply results in a decline ...

: physicians encouraging patients to consume services that the patients would not have chosen if they had been fully informed. Health planning and certificate of need laws aim to prevent the waste that would otherwise occur because of Roemer's Law. "One problem in this finding is that it could be the case that hospital stays are shorter in lower hospital bed

per capita ''Per capita'' is a Latin phrase literally meaning "by heads" or "for each head", and idiomatically used to mean "per person". The term is used in a wide variety of social sciences and statistical research contexts, including government statistic ...

regions because of a deficit in

supply Supply may refer to: *The amount of a resource that is available **Supply (economics), the amount of a product which is available to customers **Materiel, the goods and equipment for a military unit to fulfill its mission *Supply, as in confidenc ...

( reverse causation). An increased number of beds may be due to patient preference for

in-patient A patient is any recipient of health care services that are performed by healthcare professionals. The patient is most often ill or injured and in need of treatment by a physician, nurse, optometrist, dentist, veterinarian, or other health care ...

(rather than

outpatient A patient is any recipient of health care services that are performed by healthcare professionals. The patient is most often ill or injured and in need of treatment by a physician, nurse, optometrist, dentist, veterinarian, or other health care ...

) care in a region."

Enoch Powell John Enoch Powell, (16 June 1912 – 8 February 1998) was a British politician, classical scholar, author, linguist, soldier, philologist, and poet. He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament (1950–1974) and was Minister of Health (1 ...

, the British Minister of Health, propounded a similar proposition, which he called Parkinson's Law of hospital beds: "the number of patients always tends to equality with the number of beds available for them to lie in."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Roemer's law Health economics Health policy