Does The Increase In Medical Insurance Benefits Reduce Inequality In The Use Of Medical Services?

As the medical and health system reform performs,the equality of basic medical and health services has increasingly become the focus of policy attention.Basic medical insurance can reduce the inequality in the use of medical services by securing the demand side of medical services and helping the affected members to obtain medical services.This article will focus on whether the recent policy of improving medical insurance benefits is conducive to reducing inequality in the utilization of medical services.Based on CFPS data in 2014 and 2018,this paper chooses the integration of Urban Resident Basic Medical Insurance System and New Rural Cooperative Medical System as a policy treatment,and constructs a difference-in-difference model and a recentered influence function regression model.The empirical results of DID model show that the low-income group have significantly increased hospitalization due to integration policy,while this change has not occurred in middle-income group and high-income group.The results of RIF model show that improving medical insurance benefits has caused inequality in use of medical services to change toward the poor.Taking the inequality of pro-wealth trend in health conditions into account,if high-income groups with lower medical demand use more medical services,it is unequal;and if low-income groups with higher medical demand use more medical services,it is equal.Improving medical insurance benefits reduces the inequality in use of medical services.According to the conclusion,improving medical insurance benefits helps low-income people get more medical services.If the poor can obtain the necessary treatment when they are sick,they will be more likely to get rid of the vicious cycle of "unhealthy-poverty".This article suggests that future medical insurance reforms should focus on helping the poor,such as increasing the actual reimbursement rate for major illnesses,and expanding the scope of outpatient chronic reimbursement.Therefore,low-income people can pay for medical expenses and increase their use of medical services,which means they will not fall into poverty due to illness.