The Influence of Health Reform on Medical Expenditure---The Case of Thailand

• Main Authors: Yu-tung Hsu, 許瑀彤
• Other Authors: Chih-hai Yang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/62w843

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 經濟學系 === 101 === A nationwide health reform which attempted to release the financial burden on health and promote the equity of seeking treatment was implemented in Thailand in 2001. However, there are limited studies that provide a comprehensive analysis on this issue. This paper tried to evaluate the effects of policy and go further discussion across different income level and region. Data use in this paper is Social Economic Survey 2000 and 2004. We pool the data and adopt the difference-in-difference approach to estimate. Considering lack of sufficient information of health status may cause self-selection, we continue to modify by Heckman-two-stage model in later part. The empirical results show that UCS dramatically decreased outpatient, inpatient and medical health expenditure, particular in the poorest quintile. Besides, the decreasing magnitude became weaker with income increasing. Although UCS made an impressive stride toward reducing health payments, the phenomenon of widening disparity among regions indicated that the policy did not achieve the goal of balancing regional development. An attempt differ from other health reform research is that this paper did another estimate by replacing the out-of-pocket health expenditure by percentage of a household’s total consumption serve as the dependent variable. The results show that the poverty households bear relatively more health burden but the situation was inversed after the UCS.