The Effect of Urban Basic Medical Insurance on Health Service Utilisation in Shaanxi Province, China: A Comparison of Two Schemes

Zhongliang Zhou, Zhiying Zhou, Jianmin Gao, Xiaowei Yang, Ju'e Yan, Qinxiang Xue and Gang Chen

PLOS ONE, 2014, vol. 9, issue 4, 1-12

Abstract: Background: Urban population in China is mainly covered by two medical insurance schemes: the Urban Employee Basic Medical Insurance (UEBMI) for urban employees in formal sector and the Urban Resident Basic Medical Insurance (URBMI) for the left urban residents, mainly the unemployed, the elderly and children. This paper studies the effects of UEBMI and URBMI on health services utilisation in Shaanxi Province, Western China. Methods: Cross-sectional data from the 4th National Health Services Survey - Shaanxi Province was studied. The propensity score matching and the coarsened exact matching methods have been used to estimate the average medical insurance effect on the insured. Results: Compared to the uninsured, robust results suggest that UEBMI had significantly increased the outpatient health services utilisation in the last two weeks (p 0.10). It was also found that compared with the uninsured, basic medical insurance enrollees were more likely to purchase inpatient treatments in lower levels of hospitals, consistent with the incentive of the benefit package design. Conclusion: Basic Medical insurance schemes have shown a positive but limited effect on increasing health services utilisation in Shaanxi Province. The benefit package design of higher reimbursement rates for lower level hospitals has induced the insured to use medical services in lower level hospitals for inpatient services.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0094909 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 94909&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0094909

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0094909

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().