A Study On Health Output Effect Of Health Expenditure In China

Due to the special characteristics of the health care products, there are market failures in the health care market. Thus, the intervention from government turns into an essential and necessary role in improving the efficiency and ensuring the market equity. In the1990s, the health care market was characterized by excessive marketization. The weight of financial expenditure on total health care expenditure narrowed significantly, meanwhile, the growing burdens of private health expenditure put pressures on individuals. As a result,"the difficulty and high cost of getting medical treatment" has caused extensive concern. The new medical reform has emphasized the leading role of government in the health care market. The result of health care market will ultimately reflect on people’s health status, and the ultimate goal of government health expenditure is to maximize health outcome as well as minimize health inequality. Since the reform and opening-up, national health status has improved significantly, but there still exists inequality between regions and between urban and rural areas. In this context, the thesis estimates the health outcome of government health expenditure by empirical study. This paper is composed by four parts and a brief summary of each section is listed below:In part1, the thesis introduces the theory of demand for health and literature review on the relationship between government health expenditure and health outcome.In part2, the thesis quantitatively analyzes and qualitatively evaluates the scale and structure of government health expenditure, which brings out the conclusion that nowadays government health expenditure is inadequate in scale and unreasonable in structure.In part3, the thesis estimates the health outcome of government health expenditure through the macro health production function which is based on the provincial panel data (2005-2011).In part4, the thesis describes the situation of national health status and health inequality. Several policy advices are recommended so as to improve the effectiveness and fairness of government health expenditure on health outcome.