Medical Knowledge Spillovers And The Medical Problem Of China

This paper, through the medical data statistics and analysis of the behavior, puts forward a concept, the concept of knowledge spillovers of medical treatment (shortened form MKS), and based on it establish a theory about MKS. The concept and theory is based on the development for general knowledge spillovers theory in medical practices, and apply the concepts and theories to explain some of the health economy phenomena and problems. The author thinks that, in daily life lots of patients go to a doctor, they were in fact on one hand make medical consumption, on the other hand, by medical consumption they gradually obtain certain medical knowledge of their own disease, these medical knowledge will change the patients' medical behavior. When these parts of the medical knowledge overflow accumulated, they formed MKS inventory, and it will lead to some health economic phenomenon. The first health economic phenomenon is that a medical treatment of a common illness will has different economic nature with a medical treatment of a serious illness. Common medical treatment has nature of externality and serious illness medical treatment has nature of monopoly. The second health economic phenomenon is different age and different area of the population will appear different rates of going to see doctors, the rural population have low rates of illness and high rates of medical treatment, the urban population have high rates of illness and low rate of medical treatment, the population of children and young people have relatively low rates of illness and relatively high medical ratio, elderly population have high rates of illness and relatively low rates of medical care. The third health economic phenomenon is with the stock of the MKS increase, the number and proportion of social drug retail continue to increase, the separation between medicines and health cares increasingly become a trend. The compare shows a conclusion that a certain level of medical knowledge spillovers is the basic premise of separation between medicines and health care. The author thinks that in this paper there are several possible innovations:one is the first time putting forward the concept of medical knowledge spillovers, thinking that patients have certain medical knowledge stock, which changed the original hypothesis in health economics that patients and doctors have complete information asymmetry for medical knowledge. The second is putting forward a point of view that the common medical treatment and serious illness medical treatment have different economic natures. Before this people realize the different between common medical treatment and serious illness medical treatment, but they didn't realize the different affection on the consequences of medical behavior. The third is putting forward a point of view that health care has the characteristics of lagging externality. In addition, make a model of two periods to explain the causes and the process of the medical problem. The author tries to use the concept of medical knowledge spillovers to explain the continuous improvement of medical price and make a rough conclusion.