Can National Health Insurance Programs Improve Health Outcomes?—Re-Examining the Case of the New Cooperative Medical Scheme in Rural China

Xueling Chu, Qihui Chen () and Xiangming Fang

No 150488, 2013 Annual Meeting, August 4-6, 2013, Washington, D.C. from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: In 2003, China launched a new health insurance system - the New Cooperative Medicine Scheme (NCMS) in its rural areas, where more than 87 percent of China’ rural residents were not covered by any health insurance programs. By the end of 2009, the NCMS had expanded to cover 95 percent of China’s rural residents. Previous research has yielded conflicting results regarding the effects of the NCMS in rural China, but the conflicting results may be due to estimation biases. This paper uses a triple-difference method, which takes into account rural residents’ unobserved heterogeneity, to re-evaluate the impacts of the NCMS on rural residents’ health outcomes, including hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, apoplexy and born fracture. Using a longitudinal sample drawn from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, our tripledifference method indicates that the NCMS significantly reduces the incidence of diabetes, heart disease, apoplexy for rural residents over age 55. Our results also suggest that the commonlyadopted impact evaluation method, the double-difference method, is likely to underestimate the health impacts of the NCMS.

Keywords: Community/Rural/Urban Development; Health Economics and Policy; International Development; International Relations/Trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 13
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ias and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/150488/files/AAEA_2013_Chen%20_8_.pdf (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:ags:aaea13:150488

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.150488

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2013 Annual Meeting, August 4-6, 2013, Washington, D.C. from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().