Data on Science Reported by Jieming Zhong and Colleagues (The Impact of Catastrophic Medical Insurance in China: A five-year patient-level panel study): Science

2021 SEP 28 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- New research on Science is the subject of a report. According to news originating from Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China, by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “In an effort to provide greater financial protection from the risk of large medical expenditures, China has gradually added catastrophic medical insurance (CMI) to the various basic insurance schemes. Tongxiang, a rural county in Zhejiang province, China, has had CMI since 2000 for their employee insurance scheme, and since 2014 for their resident insurance scheme.”

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research, “Compiling and analysing patient-level panel data over five years, we use a difference-in-difference approach to study the effect of the 2014 introduction of CMI for resident insurance beneficiaries in Tongxiang. In our study design, resident insurance beneficiaries are the treatment group, while employee insurance beneficiaries are the control group. We find that availability of CMI significantly increases medical expenditures among resident insurance beneficiaries, including for both inpatient and outpatient spending. Despite the greater financial protection, out-of-pocket expenditures increased, in part because patients accessed treatment more often at higher-level hospitals. Better financial coverage for catastrophic medical expenditures led to greater access and expenditures, not only for inpatient admissions-the category that most often leads to catastrophic expenditures-but for outpatient visits as well. These patterns of expenditure change with CMI may reflect both enhanced access to a patient’s preferred site of care as well as the influence of incentives encouraging more care under fee-for-service payment.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies’ Policy Implementation Lab and a Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center faculty research award provided funding for this project.”

For more information on this research see: The Impact of Catastrophic Medical Insurance in China: A five-year patient-level panel study. The Lancet Regional Health - Western Pacific, 2021;13:100174.

The news correspondents report that additional information may be obtained from Jieming Zhong, Dept. of NCD Control and Prevention, Zhejiang CDC, Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China. Additional authors for this research include Min Yu, Ruying Hu, Xiangyu Chen, Chunmei Wang, Kaixu Xie, Merrell Guzman, Xiaotong Gui, Sandra Tian-Jiao Kong, Tingting Qu and Karen Eggleston.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanwpc.2021.100174. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

(Our reports deliver fact-based news of research and discoveries from around the world.)