Valuing healthcare under Taiwan's national health insurance.

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a new assessment of the most recent premium policy - the second-generation National Health Insurance (NHI) policy under Taiwan's NHI system. The willingness to pay (WTP) value for a universal coverage NHI plan is NT$201 per month and NT$940 per month for an individual level and for a household level, respectively. We find that the WTP rate is approximately 3.89% of monthly household income, consistent with the range of the new premium rate (2.5-4% of monthly household income) proposed by Taiwan's government. However, the regressive effect of the new premium policy is significant, suggesting that policy makers may consider other policy alternatives such as subsidy to the lower income for healthcare to eliminate the possible regressive effect of the second-generation-NHI premium policy.