4.3. National Health Insurance payment association
Using NHI reimbursement and number of beds to correlate waste production may not be entirely valid. Both factors imply the scale of a medical establishment. In Taiwan, the larger hospitals care for more inpatients and outpatients, and thus receive a greater amount of NHI reimbursement. The larger hospital has greater capacity to provide infectious disease care and more effective waste management. Therefore, NHI payment and total number of beds were significant variables in predicting the amount of infectious wastes. Although, this may not be a direct association, the increase of every 0.1 billion NT dollars in NHI reimbursement reflected an increase of 8 Tons of annual infectious waste generation (p < 0.0001). On the other hand, NHI payment was not a significant factor to predict the general waste production rate (p = 0.22). We also found that the generation of infectious waste could be reduced by 0.13 Tons for the increase of every unit (one bed) of total number of beds.