Among the policies toward all hospital-ownership types, two tendencies can be observed. One is the differentiation of ordinary beds into acute care and chronic care beds, as discussed in the Methods section. This differentiation led to the introduction of longterm care insurance in 2000 and to the distinct category of long-term care beds under the Medical Care Law. Another tendency is the provision of financial incentives to hospitals that decided to adopt short LOS/acute care. The combination of these two types of policies was expected to lead to a reduction in the LOS of ordinary beds as a whole. Since the 1980s, hospital owners and managers have been repeatedly faced with management decisionmaking between short LOS/acute care and long LOS/chronic care of their ordinary beds, and as a result, their choice of direction toward short LOS/acute care reduced the LOS.