Assignment:
1. What is balance billing and why is it a prohibited practice?
2. What is the differenebetwen gross medical services revenue and net medical service revenue?
3. What is balance billing?
4. Define bad debt expense.
5. The operating marging ratio compares net income to total revenues to measure the efficiency of a business. A life care facility had total revenues of $4,000,000 in 2011 and net income of $400,000. What is the operating margin of the facility for 2011?
6. Probabilities may be defined in multiple ways, and all of these methods are valid as long as they satisfy the basic mathematical requirements for a probability distribution (i.e., the probabilities assigned to particular outcomes are non-negative and all of the probabilities for a particular event must sum to one). For cases like coin flips and rolls of a die, the classical probability definition may be used to assign equal probability to all possible outcomes (assuming the coin or die is properly constructed).
For events that are observed multiple times, the probabilities may be assigned as the percentage of observed outcomes under the frequency definition of probability. For example, airlines often report the share of trips for which a particular flight was on time (say 80% on time), so we can use 0.80 as the probability that the next flight on this route is on time.
For events that are not repeated over time, we can still assign probabilities based on our experience or expertise, and this is known as the subjective definition of probability because it depends on an individual assessment of likelihood. Many of the probability examples presented in this chapter are based on subjective probabilities because they are one-time-only events that cannot be repeated (e.g., pricing decisions or strategic games).
Can you provide an example of a subjective probability that you may use to make decisions in your daily activities? Do you ever adjust this probability over time? If firms must use subjective probabilities to make decisions, how can they protect against costly mistakes that may arise from using poorly chosen subjective probabilities?