A Research On The Effect Of The New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme In Expanding The Enrollees’ Medical Demand

The impacts of the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme (NRCMS) have been a heated research issue since it was adopted. This paper analyzes the effect of the NRCMS in expanding the enrollees’demand for medical services. The basic argument for health insurance is that it expands the medical demand by reducing the cost of treatment. Therefore, the rural residents’medical demand will be released after they were enrolled the NRCMS, and this was supported by lots of empirical research that take the rural elderly residents as research objects. However, in this study, the estimate of the effect of the NRCMS on medical demand is not significant when we take the enrollees of all ages as research objects. The puzzle may reflect that some problems have emerged in the expansion of the NRCMS.This paper suggests that the non evidence-based policy design especially the reimbursement design and the medical system that the NRCMS embedded are the reasons why the NRCMS cannot expand the enrollees’medical demand significantly. After that, the paper proposes some corresponding countermeasures and suggestions that we should streamline the policy design and the medical system. Furthermore, the NRCMS and the medical system’s research directions are reviewed in this paper.This paper uses the difference-in-differences method and the China Health and Nutrition Survey to estimate the effect of the NRCMS in expanding the enrollees’demand for medical services. The contributions of this paper can be stated in three aspects. First of all, the paper takes the enrollees of all ages as research objects while most previous papers take the elderly enrollees as research objects. Obviously, our strategy is better for estimating the impacts of the NRCMS comprehensively. Secondly, the result is different from the most previous researches, which may provide alternative insights. At last, this paper proposes some countermeasures and suggestions detailed while the previous researches rare did.