Supply Efficiency Of Medicare And Health In Rural China

The development of medical and health services relates to people’s happiness and health, and also relates to the coordination development of economic and social. It is also an important policy objective for most countries all over the world. To China, which has more than half of the total population lives in the rural area, health insurance indeed is a hard work. With the development of economic and social, China’s rural health care work has carried out some corresponding reforms, especially since the implementation of the new rural cooperative medical care system in2003, rural medical and health services has achieved significant achievement, but in the vast rural areas it is still difficult and expensive to see a doctor. So with the limited health investment, how to improve the efficiency of the existing health care resources is important.Based on this, this paper first uses both the data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier model to analysis the rural health efficiency among the31provinces of our country from2000to2009.The results show that the rural heath efficiency is increasing during the past10years, especially since the implementation of the new rural cooperative medical system in2003.It shows that the investment in rural health care has played a good role in promoting the rural health care efficiency. However, the efficiency among various provinces is much different.In order to explain the difference of efficiency among the provinces, empirical analysis was done in chapter4by selecting the factors such as rural per capita income, education level, population density, and the region and the new rural cooperative policy as dummy variables. It is found that the level of per capita income and population density play a positive role in promoting efficiency, but the educational level has a negative effect on efficiency. The rural health care in the eastern part is more efficient than the central and western regions, while the implementation of the new rural cooperative policy also contributed to the efficiency of rural health care.The level of medical efficiency gap between provinces is significantly affected by many factors, and the affection of the various fectors is very different among provinces. In other words, it is affected by whether the fectors have threshold level and whether the provinces have crossed the threshold level. Therefore, in chapter5we established a threshold panel data model to test the threshold levels of the rural residents per capita income levels, population density in rural areas, the average level of education and rural residents per capita consumption expenditure. The results showed that all the four factors existent the threshold phenomenon, and the threshold level at least two.Based on the above study, this thesis summarized the basic questions analyzed in the paper, and put forward some suggestions from three angles inclusive of the government, hospitals and the rural residents, in order to improve the efficiency of health services in China’s vast rural areas, and promote the rural economic development finally.