Financial impact of nurses ballot question? Depends who's counting.

When they talk about the impact of ballot Question 1, Massachusetts hospital executives keep repeating one big number: $1 billion. That’s how they’ve described the approximate cost — annually — of the question that seeks to regulate nurse staffing. Last week, they started detailing the costs for individual hospitals. If the ballot question passes, the parent company of Cape Cod Hospital estimates it would have to spend more than $34 million a year to comply with the measure.