A Study On Feasible Level Of Funding For The New Rural Cooperative Medical System

Objectives The feasible level of funding for the New rural cooperative medical system (NRCMS) is the level which both consistent with current policy and satisfy rural households'ability and willingness to pay for the NRCMS. This study analyzed the feasibility of the funding level and determined the scientifically and rationally feasible level of funding.Methods Firstly, estimated the per capital medical compensation by the method of loss distribution; secondly, estimated the rural households'objective ability to pay by ELES and FELES model ; thirdly, evaluated the rural households'subjective willingness to pay by Logistic model; finally, determined the feasible level of funding via the theory of price elasticity of demand.Results Main conclusions as following: Firstly, for the effective costs of hospitalization of Cixi's NRCMS in 2008, the second order Mixed Poisson distribution was the optimal model of hospitalized times for the designated medical institutions in town-level, city-level and outside the city, and the Poisson-Binomial distribution just for non-designated medical institution outside the city. The optimal model of cost per for those medical institution was Log-Logistic distribution and Burr distribution, respectively. For the effective costs of hospitalization of Fenghua's NRCMS, the second order Mixed Poisson distribution was the optimal model of hospitalized times for the designated medical institutions in first-class and second-class, and the Poisson-Binomial distribution just for the third-class institution. The optimal model of cost per for those medical institution was Inverse Guass distribution and Burr distribution, respectively. For the effective costs of hospitalization of Panan's NRCMS, the Negative-Binomial distribution was the optimal model of hospitalized times and Burr distribution was the optimal model of cost per. The per capital medical compensation of Cixi's NRCMS was estimated to be 160yuan.Secondly, for the analysis of the rural households'objective ability to pay of the NRCMS, the proportion of no ability to pay of the NRCMS was least and estimated to be 10% by all ELES, FELES1 and FELES2 models. The proportions of without ability to pay, ability to pay less and complete ability to pay for the NRCMS were about 10%, 20% and 70%, respectively. ELES model could be surrogated by FELES2 model, which was similar to ELES and used in analysis of the structure of households'consumption.Thirdly, for the analysis of the rural households'subjective willingness to pay of the NRCMS, the factors significantly influenced the willingness of participating in the NRCMS were whether attending and understanding the NRCMS or not. The main factors that affected the level of subjective willingness to pay were quantity of labor force and the knowledge of the NRCMS. Finally, it was concluded that the feasible level of funding for the NRCMS was 90yuan-200yuan.Conclusions The loss distribution which used for estimating per capital medical compensation by SAS and the relationships among rural households'ability to pay, willingness to pay and funding level were established in the study, and provided the method of estimating the funding level finally. The methods and findings was of reference value for other areas as well.