Increase of the Household Medical Care Expenditure After the Implementation of National Health Insurance
2012/10/16
研討會日期 : 2012-10-16
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Chien-Liang Chen
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Chien-Liang Chen received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of California, Los Angeles in 1995. He is currently serving as Professor of Economics at National Chi Nan University. His research field is in economic development, labor economics, public economics, and econometrics.
演講摘要 : It is well known that expansion of health insurance will inevitably lead to overuse of medical care resource. Unlike most studies rely on aggregate data to analyze the issue, this study employs individual data to document the co-movement between health insurance coverage and medical care expenditure. The social experiment of a universal National Health Insurance (NHI) program implemented in 1995 in Taiwan enables us to identify the detailed magnitudes of the possible overuse of medical care resources. Incorporating conditional quantile technique into the context of difference-in-differences estimator, it is found that the NHI does trigger significant increase of medical care expenditure. The increment is negatively associated with the conditional distribution. Households of lower income, with heads of child-bearing age or lower education tend to consume more medical care resource than their counterparts after NHI implementation. It is worth to note that the marginal propensity to overuse is uniformly heterogeneous across the conditional distribution.
