Short answers, pulled from the story.
A hospital is a healthcare institution that provides patient treatment with specialized medical staff and equipment. The word comes from the Latin hospes, meaning a stranger, foreigner, or guest, and shares its root with host, hospitality, hostel, and hotel.
Hospitals are classified as general, specialty, or government depending on their sources of income. The general or acute-care hospital handles many diseases and injuries, district hospitals are the major facility in a region, and specialty hospitals focus on fields such as rehabilitation, pediatrics, geriatrics, or psychiatric care.
Healing institutions existed in early India, recorded by the monk Fa Xian around AD 400, and in Sri Lanka under King Pandukabhaya, who reigned from 437 to 367 BC. The earliest general hospital in the Islamic world was built in Baghdad in 805 under Harun Al-Rashid, and after the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325 a hospital was begun in every cathedral town.
In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service, founded in 1948, delivers care free at the point of delivery to legal residents. In the United States, hospitals typically operate privately and sometimes for-profit, billing through a chargemaster, though law requires them to treat patients in life-threatening emergencies regardless of ability to pay.
US hospitalizations peaked in 1981 at 171 admissions per 1,000 Americans across 6,933 hospitals, then the rate fell more than 10 percent and the count dropped to 5,534 by 2016. More complex care became available at home and in physicians' offices, and the public increasingly viewed hospitals as life-threatening rather than therapeutic.
The World Health Organization reported in 2011 that being admitted to a hospital was far riskier than flying, with about a 10 percent chance of a treatment error and roughly a one in 300 chance of death from an error. In the United States, 1.7 million health care-associated infections are acquired each year, leading to 100,000 deaths.