My mom is a physician she's retired and she used to work in rehab medicine.

She worked at this university in Richmond, Virginia for many years and that university invited

me to go give a talk at this place called Sheltering Arms Institute.

So I go to this facility and it looks almost like a four seasons meets a rehab hospital.

I mean the place was brand new, the ceilings were probably 30 or 40 feet tall and I remember

thinking myself I would never want to leave this place if I needed to go to a rehab hospital because

it was absolutely stunning. The patient floors and huge windows, lots of sunlight and it struck

me how the environment in which people receive care might matter.

Because usually Bapu hospitals aren't places anyone really wants to be, right?

That's by producer Julie Cantfer and she's right, most of us do not want to be in the hospital

even if it's as beautiful and new as the Sheltering Arms Institute. But a lot of the time

hospitalizations can't be avoided. More than 33 million times each year in the US to be exact

according to data from 2020. And in those cases maybe the slightest difference, a senior room,

better fitting gown or softer pillow could impact how you feel.

I'm Bob Ujena and this is Freakonomics MD. Today on the show hospital amenities might make

patients feel happy. But do they also make them feel better?

Suppose you want to figure out whether going to a hospital with better amenities impacts your

care in your outcomes in a positive way. The problem is that if you look at patients who go to

fancy hospitals, those hospitals are different than other hospitals in a lot of ways and the

patients who go there are probably very different. So you can't really infer anything about

the quality of medical care or the outcomes of patients in those two different settings by

comparing great amenity versus no amenity hospitals. But there's a couple of cities I thought were

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