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| Effects of Separating Treatment and Drug Sales: Evidence from Medical Insurance Claims Data |
| CHEN Zui, SONG Ze, ZHANG Chuanchuan
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School of Finance and Statistics, Hunan University;
School of Economics, Nankai University;
School of Economics, Central University of Finance and Economics |
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Abstract As a requirement of the public hospital reform initiated by the State Council in 2015, public hospitals in pilot cities should remove the markup on drug sales, and separate treatment and drug sales.Using medical insurance claims data from 2013 to 2015 for enrollees in the Urban Employee Basic Medical Insurance in one of China’s provincial capital cities, this paper examines the impact of separating treatment and drug sales reform on inpatient spending.The results show that the reform increases the inpatient spending by 4.9 percent, but has no statistically significant effects on out-of-pocket spending, which corresponds with a significant increase in the reimbursement rate.In addition, the reform substantially reduces the spending on drugs by 9.5 percent, but increases the spending on caring and diagnoses service by 69.7 and 53.4 percent, respectively.Moreover, the results show that the reform also leads to an increase in the frequency of inpatient visits in a given time period.In sum, the reform improves the composition of hospital revenue, but fails to reduce total inpatient spending and the out-of-pocket spending.
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Received: 01 February 2018
Published: 16 November 2018
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