Estimating the Impact of Social Medical Insurance Schemes on Children’s Health and Hospital Use: The Chinese Case

Jing Guana and Juan de Dios Tena

No 20188, Working Papers from University of Liverpool, Department of Economics

Abstract: This study investigates the causal impact of acquiring social medical Insurance on hospital utilization 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 low income and rural children. 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)
JEL-codes: I13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-hea, nep-ias and nep-tra
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https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/schoolof ... f-social-medical.pdf First version, 2018 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:liv:livedp:20188

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