Abstract
Using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, this study investigated the impact of health insurance coverage on children’s health in China. To address the potential endogeneity between insurance and health, we adopted the instrumental variable probit model. We found that insurance enrollment significantly improved the health of children, especially urban children, but there was no significant insurance effect across gender. After using the propensity score matching method, an alternative measure of child health, and a sub-sample of children aged above 10, our major finding of the insurance effect on child health is verified and robust. We further conducted the path analysis by identifying three potential paths through which medical insurance improved child health. We found that child health behaviour and nutritional intake are the effective paths between insurance enrollment and health status. These results provided implications for policy makers in constructing and developing the supportive system of child medical insurance in China.
Highlights
Health is a comprehensive status of physical, mental, and social well-being
The aim of this paper is to explore the effect of the public health insurance coverage on child health using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS)
We found the current coverage of public medical insurance did not significantly improve the utilization of health service, which was primarily due to partial inpatient cost covered by the new rural cooperative medical scheme (NRCMS) and urban resident basic medical insurance (URBMI)
Summary
Health is a comprehensive status of physical, mental, and social well-being. According to Constitution of the World Health Organization (1946), the enjoyment of the highest attainable health standard is one of the essential rights of every human being. Health is a form of human capital, as durable and accumulating as physical capital (Lucas 1988). While health depreciates over time, it can be increased with health investment, such as medical care, leisure, and exercise. Medical insurance is considered a primary mechanism that reduces medical expenditures incurred by disease risks. Its direct function is to lower economic barriers for medical treatments, to manage financial risk and ensure financial accessibility of health care services. Since the utilization of medical services is designed for health (Grossman 1972), the ultimate goal of health insurance is to maintain and promote the individual’s health outcome
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