Do Social Medical Insurance Schemes Improve Children's Health in China?

J. Guan and Juan de Dios Tena

Working Paper CRENoS from Centre for North South Economic Research, University of Cagliari and Sassari, Sardinia

Abstract: This study investigates the causal impact of acquiring social medical Insurance on hospital utilisation and health status for children under 16 years old in China from 2010 to 2016. We consider the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), a longitudinal database which allows us to control for the effect of unobserved individual heterogeneity by means of difference-in-difference regressions combined with matching regression techniques. Our findings suggest that participating in social medical insurance schemes significantly increases children's yearly hospital use, especially for children who come from rural China. Moreover, this increase is not significantly different for people who were not previously sick. It is also found that social medical insurance schemes have no effect or even a marginally negative effect on children's health status in some cases. We discuss some potential explanations for this result.

Keywords: China; Social Medical Insurance; Health Outcomes; difference-in-difference; propensity score matching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-hea, nep-ias and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://crenos.unica.it/crenos/node/7131
https://crenos.unica.it/crenos/sites/default/files/wp-18-07.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:cns:cnscwp:201807

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper CRENoS from Centre for North South Economic Research, University of Cagliari and Sassari, Sardinia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CRENoS ().