A Preliminary Analysis Of The Effect Of The New Rural Cooperative Medical System On Inpatient Care At A County Hospital

Backgrounds and ObjectivesChina began to explore new rural cooperative medical system(NCMS) since2002aiming to improve the medical and healthcare service for over600million farmers and gradually ease their difficulties in access and affording medical care especially inpatient care. Longyou county was among the first experimental counties in Zhejiang Province to implement NCMS in2004. This article aims to evaluate the effect of the NCMS on inpatient care utilization during2003to2012at one of county hospitals.Materials and MethodsWe use literature review to collect data and information about the policy and enrollment of NCMS. We take all inpatients at the hospital from2003to2012as our study sample to analyze the difference in the indicators (expenditure, length of hospital staying and proportion of expenditure covered by healthcare financing systems); we also use simple random sampling technique to choose two common disease to do further analysis in order to make the comparison more reliable.ResultsSince the implementation of NCMS the composition of inpatients with NCMS at the county hospital increased year after year. The expenditure of hospitalization increased also; self-paid actual expenditure decreased; the proportion of expenditure covered by NCMS increased, reaching at51.27%in2012. The difference in the proportions between NCMS and staff health insurance decreased year after year.ConclusionNCMS has increased the use of inpatient care at county hospital, narrowed the gap of medical care between rural and urban residents.