Abstract
This paper investigates the impact of Urban and Rural Resident Basic Medical Insurance (URRBMI) on the health of preschool and school-age children in rural China using data from the 2018 wave of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS). We employ the propensity score matching approach and causal forest to evaluate impacts. Results show that the URRBMI has significantly improved the health status of preschool children. However, the health improvement of school-age children by URRBMI is only limited to obese children, and this effect is not significant. In addition, this paper identifies important variables related to heterogeneity through the causal forest and evaluates the heterogeneity of the impact of URRBMI on the health of two types of children. For preschool children, we find disadvantaged mothers (i.e., with lower wealth, lower educated, or in rural areas) benefit more from the URRBMI. No significant heterogeneity is found for the school-age children. Our study demonstrates the power of causal forest to uncover the heterogeneity in policy evaluation, hence providing policymakers with valuable information for policy design.
Highlights
Most observations were within common range,group so propensity score matching could be performed in the the common common value range, so propensity score matching could be performed in the common support area
That for preschool children aged 0 to 5 years, the estimates of Weight for Height Z-score (WHZ) were significant at the level of 1%, and the estimates of Weight for Age Z-score (WAZ) and Height by Age Z-score (HAZ) were significant at the level of 5%, which indicated that Urban and Rural Resident Basic Medical Insurance (URRBMI) has significantly improved the nutritional and health status of insured children in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term
The results show that URRBMI significantly improves the HAZ, WAZ, and WHZ of preschool children, indicating that URRBMI has effectively improved the health status of preschool children
Summary
Medical insurance is one of the most important policies to guarantee residents’ health and ensure stable social development. The question of “Does Urban and Rural Resident Basic Medical Insurance effectively improve the health status of the rural residents?” has attracted the attention of many scholars and policymakers. This paper uses the data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) in 2018 and employs the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) approach to estimate the causal effect between URRBMI and children’s health status. Hainmueller and Mummolo found that the results based on the interaction are fragile and model-dependent [6] Neither of these two methods can investigate the heterogeneity of the data systematically and comprehensively, which may lead to the omission of important conclusions. We estimate the impact of URRBMI on the health status of children in rural China through the PSM approach.
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