Research On The Effect Of Health Insurance Based On Asymmetric Information

The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race,religion,political belief,economic or social condition.Establishing and improving the health protection system has become the focus of our governments to protect the health of the people.Social basic medical insurance and commercial health insurance is an indispensable part of our medical security system.Although the basic medical insurance system has covered almost all the population in general,the special nature makes it inevitably affected by selection effect and moral hazard.Besides compulsory insurance for urban workers' medical insurance,the New Cooperative Medical System(NCMS)and Urban Basic Medical Insurance System(UBMIS)have adopted the principle of voluntary insurance,that is,under the conditions of given payment requirements and government subsidy policy,individuals or families can Choose whether to participate in the basic medical insurance.Given the voluntary nature of the participation in the NCMS and UBMIS,the participation is inherently affected by private(and thus asymmetric)information owned by rural and urban households.This asymmetric information might lead to adverse selection or advantageous selection,reducing the welfare of rural and urban households.Therefore,the identification of the selection is necessary for welfare assessment of the NCMS and UBMIS.Instead of the previous focus on adverse selection caused by the private health risk information,we introduce other dimensions of asymmetric information and isolate the impact of moral hazard to test the potential selection by using a high-quality household survey data.Based on the selection effect,we evaluate the effect of the NCMS and UBMIS.As an important supplement to the basic medical insurance system,commercial health insurance income keeps increasing in recent years and its coverage continues to expand.However,there exist some unfavorable factors in the market impeding the further development of health insurance.Cost control is still a worldwide problem so far,for example,how to control the additional medical cost caused by moral hazard.The compensation system of health insurance is based on the insured's medical documents.Moreover,health insurance companies and hospitals must realize a "risk-sharing,benefit-sharing" cooperation relation.In the view of uneven distribution of medical resources in our country,it is difficult for insurance companies to establish cooperation mechanisms with medical institutions,which can affect the health seeking behavior and medical costs.In the moment,there is no information release and data sharing mechanism among medical institutions,social security departments and commercial insurance.The lack of medical basic data increases the operating risk of commercial insurance,and it is unfavorable for controlling unreasonable rise of the medical expenses.Therefore,how to overcome the problem of asymmetric information in health insurance is an important issue that is related to the sustainable development of commercial health insurance in China.In this paper,the microcosmic data of the pilot survey are used to test the asymmetric information of commercial health insurance in China and evaluate the welfare effect based on it.Thus,we propose feasible advice for commercial health insurance companies.