The Cost of Providing Health Care to Injured Soldiers in War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: As the Global War on Terror progresses, the total health cost for treating wounded soldiers continues to rise. Although some reports have estimated the total cost of soldiers' health care, no study has attempted to rigorously quantify this amount. We sought to quantify the cost of providing health care to soldiers injured while on duty in a conflict area. METHODS: Retrospective study of all Canadian Forces (CF) soldiers injured in Afghanistan from February 7, 2006, to February 6, 2007. CF trauma registry was used to identify all injured Canadian soldiers and hospitalized at the military field hospital in Kandahar. Financial reports from the Canadian Forces Health Services were used to quantify the cost of providing care to these soldiers in Kandahar at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center and during evacuation back to Canada. Insurance claims paid (as of October 15, 2007) to a third-party insurer by the CF were used to quantify the charges and costs of health care in Canada. All dollar figures are in Canadian dollars. RESULTS: During the 1-year period, the CF spent more than $24.3 million to provide health care to 1,245 patients at its field hospital in Kandahar. One hundred twenty-seven of these patients were injured Canadian soldiers who required admission to the field hospital. A total of 93 soldiers required evacuation to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, and of these, 75 required further care at the Canadian civilian hospitals. The CF spent approximately $2.5 million to provide trauma care in Kandahar to its 127 injured soldiers. Caring for 93 wounded soldiers at Landstuhl Regional medical center cost approximately $2.0 million. Air evacuation costs of 75 wounded soldiers back to Canada cost $3.9 million. The CF were charged approximately $2.4 million for further care in Canada for 75 severely wounded soldiers. The estimated actual cost of this care in Canada was $1.4 million. CONCLUSIONS: Estimating the financial cost to properly care for soldiers wounded on overseas duty in the conflict areas is critical for future planning and forecasting. We estimated on average, it costs approximately $20,000 to care for a wounded soldier at a field hospital who is subsequently returned to duty, $42,000 for the case of a wounded soldier treated at an out-of-theater regional referral hospital and subsequently returned to duty, and $113,000 to care for a wounded soldier who is repatriated and finally treated in Canada. Most of the costs are from establishing and staffing field hospitals in the conflict area and from evacuation costs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".