The Operating Efficiency Of New Rural Cooperative Medical Insurance Fund

The New Cooperative Medical System (NCMS) for rural residents, as the basic medical security system in our country at present stage, plays an important role in ensuring that fanners have access to basic medical services, relieving the financial burden of the disease, and enhancing farmer's health standard. NCMS insurance fund, the special medical service venture capital established to implement the new cooperative medical system, is used to compensate the payment of medical expense for the farmers who are enrolled in the NCMS. Its operating efficiency is the key of whether the NCMS does continue to operate efficiently. However, there are still some problems in current NCMS insurance fund, such as the low level of financing and protection, unfair benefits, low utilization ratio of funds, etc, which threatens the sustainable development of the NCMS.On the basis of relevant data of the NCMS implementation collected from 31 provincial areas in our country in 2006, this paper calculates the operating efficiency of the NCMS insurance fund in these areas by utilizing Stochastic frontier Cost Model, analyzes and evaluates the operating efficiency differences of the NCMS fund and its reasons in the eastern, central and western regions of China by using comparative analysis method, which has a vital and practical significance in further enhancing the operating efficiency of the cooperative medical insurance fund, and improving the implementation of the NCMS program.Through the analysis, we could arrive at following conclusions in this paper. First, the major factor affecting the operating efficiency of the NCMS fund is the actual per capita fund quantum, the annual utilizing rate of the fund as well as its beneficial rate, which, by means of the principal componential analyzing method, is discovered in the process of selecting vitiate indexes and the parameter estimating test of the Stochastic Frontier Cost Model.Second, the operating efficiency of the NCMS insurance fund in these 31 provincial areas in China in 2006 is calculated and evaluated, the result of which demonstrates that the overall operating efficiency of the NCMS insurance fund in our country is running good. However, the efficiency in middle areas is comparatively the lowest.Finally, the principal factor leading to the lowest operating efficiency of the NCMS insurance fund in middle areas is that the late implementation of its pilot project in these areas, fewer pilot areas, fewer farmers who are positively willing to be involved in it, less financing quantum per capita, overrun managing expenses, improper overall plan of family accounts, less beneficial rate the enrolled farmers could obtain, etc, which is found in the analysis of the three operating sections of the NCMS insurance fund that include fund financing, overall managing, as well as the compensating purchase.In this paper, improving the operating efficiency of the NCMS insurance fund from its three sections is proposed. First, from the fund financing aspect, the transition from voluntary participation to compulsory involvement should be implemented; the financing orders should be adjusted; and the diversified financing channels and approaches should be created. In addition, from the aspect of its overall planning management, the level of the plan as a whole should be further enhanced. An independent governing and organizing institution as well as the information managing system of the NCMS insurance fund should be founded to improve its managing efficiency. Eventually, from the aspect of the fund compensating payment, the compensation in out-patient clinic should be enlarged; the approaches of compensating payment should be ameliorated to expand the benefits and improve the beneficial equity of the NCMS insurance fund.