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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Public Health
Sec. Health Economics
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1315153
This article is part of the Research Topic Medical Overuse and Underuse in Healthcare Systems View all 7 articles

Health behavior and Medical insurance under the Healthy China Strategy : A Moral hazard perspective

Provisionally accepted
Yingying Li Yingying Li 1Xiaocang Xu Xiaocang Xu 2*
  • 1 Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, Shanghai, Shanghai Municipality, China
  • 2 Huzhou University, Huzhou, Zhejiang, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    High medical expenditure is one of the major obstacles to achieving common prosperity in China. As a health risk compensation and protection mechanism, medical insurance has played a good role in alleviating the economic burden of patients. However, due to the existence of moral hazard, medical insurance may also lead to the occurrence of psychological deviation and overtreatment of patients or hospitals' health treatment expectations, thus generating unnecessary pressure on public financial expenditure. Using the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey (CHARLS) and Heckman model, this paper discusses the difference in the impact of medical insurance on outpatient and hospitalization costs. The change of the proportion of out-of-pocket medical expenditure is further analyzed. The study found that while medical insurance reduced the probability of outpatient visits and increased the probability of hospitalization, it increased the cost of outpatient visits and hospitalization. Further, it reduces the share of out-of-pocket medical expenditure. This shows that medical insurance does play a role in alleviating the financial pressure of patients, but the overtreatment caused by moral hazard cannot be ignored, especially the over-examination and over-prescribing of drugs in the outpatient process.

    Keywords: Healthy China Strategy, Psychological deviation, Moral hazard, Medical insurance, Out-of-pocket medical expenditure

    Received: 10 Oct 2023; Accepted: 28 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Li and Xu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Xiaocang Xu, Huzhou University, Huzhou, 313000, Zhejiang, China

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