The Empirical Research On The Effect Of Social Health Insurance On The Medical Care Demand Of Citizens

Basic social health insurance compensates individuals’ medical expenditurewhen they utilize medical care services due to illness. The purpose of governmentimplementing basic social health insurance is to improve individuals’ outpatient orinpatient demand as well as reduces their financial burden to a certain degree. Inrecent years, the coverage rate of the basic social health insurance, i.e. the New RuralCooperative Medical Insurance (NRCMI) and the Urban Basic Medical Insurance(UBMI) implemented by China’s government increases rapidly. But how does it affectresidents’ outpatient utilization and medical expenditure? This paper intends toexamine the effect of basic social health insurance on residents’ health care demand toverify its implementation effect.This paper first describes the relative research of health care services demandand basic social health insurance by both foreign and domestic scholars, as well asoutlining the theory of health care services demand, the mechanism of the effect ofbasic social health insurance on health care services and the theoretical model usedhere. Second, this paper descriptively analyzes the development status of the basicsocial health insurance and the medical expenditures of residents. In the empiricalanalysis, this article uses the2006and2009panel data of Chinese Nutrition andHealth Survey (CHNS) data, considering the endogenous problem of the basic socialhealth insurance, to examine the effect of the NRCMI and the UBMI on outpatientutilization and medical expenditure of rural and urban residents respectively. Thisstudy finds that both the NRCMI and the UBMI improve outpatient utilization of ruraland urban residents, but does not reduce their medical expenditure. Total medicalexpenditure increases, thought personal burden of expenditure doesn’t increasesignificantly, it doesn’t decrease as expected yet. The result shows that the effect ofthe basic social health insurance is less than ideal. The policy of the basic socialhealth insurance needs to be improved. Finally, this article concludes with severalpolicy recommendations to improve the basic social health insurance.