Impact of healthcare insurance on medical expense in China: new evidence from meta-analysis

This paper is aimed to make sense of the real effect of implement of social healthcare insurance on one’s medical expense in China. Due to previous studies drew various and inconsistent conclusions on this issue, this works intend to apply meta-analysis to the problem. For 31 related studies, we first implement an advanced conditional Dirichlet-based Bayesian semi-parametric model specific to meta-analysis, and come to a primary conclusion that healthcare possesses little probability reducing one’s medical expense in China. Further, the authors conduct random effects meta-regression and find that heterogeneity exists among the observed effect sizes. Mixed effects model shows that the age variation may is actually the heterogeneity source. The coefficients for Non-old and Old are respectively 0.29 and 0.54, implying that when researching on the medical expense for the elderly, it is more likely to conclude the medical insurance could increase medical spending. The coefficients for IV and OLS are both remarkably negative at 90% confidence level. This suggests when directly using Instrument Variable (IV) approach and OLS method to assess the implementation effect for the healthcare insurance, it is inclined to result in the reduced impact on medical expense. We deduce this is because this two methods can’t solve the sample-selection bias when compared with the Two-part model and difference-in-difference (DID) model. Based on the results and discussion, we finally propose suggests for the government.