National Health Insurance and Physician Allocation: The Case of Taiwan
2019/09/24
研討會日期 : 2019-09-24
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Yin-Chi Wang (王胤琪)
主持人 : Professor Tzu-Ting Yang
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Professor Wang received her Ph.D. in Economics from Washington University in 2012. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Economics at National Taipei University. Her main research fields are growth and development, and macroeconomics.
演講摘要 : We develop a two-sector general equilibrium life-cycle model of endogenous physicians’ specialty choice to study the impact of the National Health Insurance (NHI) in Taiwan. The model is calibrated to Taiwan data to study how the NHI affects the health of the population and the allocation of physicians across specialties in the medical sector. We find that as the price of medical service decreases under the NHI, the quantity of medical services increases by more than 35 percent. However, the effective quality of medical services actually decreases. The situation further worsens after the implementation of the global budget scheme which is meant to control the cost of NHI. While the average health of the population first improved under the NHI, our simulation results show that as the effective quality of medical service deteriorates, the average health level of the population will decrease to a level that is worse than that before the implementation of the NHI. As for the allocation of physicians, although physicians first walk away from the major five specialties to the non-major five specialties, in the long run, a proportion of later generations physicians will switch back to the major give specialties.
