The effects of catastrophic disease insurance policy on benefit discrepancy between the patients covered by different medical insurances in Zhuhai City, China / 中国卫生政策研究

ABSTRACT

Objective: This study aims to analyze the effects of catastrophic disease insurance (CDI), especially to evaluate the influences of CDI on the discrepancy of benefits between the patients covered by the Employee's Medical Insurance (EMI) and the Resident's Medical Insurance (RMI).Methods: The data used in the study are collected from the health insurance database of Zhuhai City in the years of 2012 and 2014.A descriptive analysis is made to depict the general situation of CDI in the city, and a logistic regression model is used to analyze the factors that affect the probability to get the benefits of CDI.Moreover, a triple difference model is built up to probe into the CDI's effects on the discrepancy of reimbursement ratio between patients covered by EMI and RMI.Results: The benefits of CDI favor the patients with old age, high medical expenditures and chronic diseases.When other factors are controlled, patients covered by EMI have lower probability to get CDI benefits than those covered by RMI.Within the patients with high medical expenditures who have gotten the CDI benefits, those covered by EMI enjoy higher reimbursement ratio than those covered by RMI, but CDI decreases the discrepancy by 3.2%.Conclusions: Since the CDI gives more favor to the vulnerable population and narrows the gap of the benefits between EMI and RMI, the policy improves the equity of health security.