Medicare And Medicaid Payment Behavior Experience

The paper investigates the relationship between health care insurance and expenditures in urban China. Using the two waves of Chinese Household Income Project Survey (CHIPs), we find that under different types of medical care insurance people's behaviors on expenditures tend to be varied. From a gender perspective, we evaluate the effect of health care insurance and find that the health care insurance reduced the gender gap on medical expenses and provided male more benefits than female. Due to the self-selection problems associated with non-experimental data, we implement Propensity Score Matching (PSM) methods to measure the possibilities of insurance enrollment. The results show that there are moral hazard problems in 1995 health insurance system. Higher proportion of public health insurance led lower levels in utilization of medical resources. In 2002, medical insurance system effectively improved people's abilities of medical payments. Over-Utilization in medical services, however, existed in all types of medical care insurance, especially free medical services.