Abstract
Our work aimed to build a reasonable proxy for unmet medical demands of China’s urban residents. We combined health demand modeling and stochastic frontier analysis to produce a frontier medical demand function, which allowed us to disentangle unmet medical demands from the unobservable effects. We estimated unmet medical demands by using China’s provincial dataset that covered 2005–2018. Our estimates showed that unmet medical demand at the national level was 12.6% in 2018, and regions with high medical prices confronted more unmet medical demands than regions with moderate or low medical prices during 2005–2018. Furthermore, medical prices and education were the main factors that affected unmet medical demand; therefore, policy making should pay more attention to reducing medical costs and promoting health education.
Highlights
Human health closely affects residential living standards, and the associated human capital of health is one key element of economic growth
Our findings showed that China’s unmet medical demand at the national level was 0.126 in 2018, which indicated that the current medical care system satisfied about 87.4% of total medical demand by urban residents
Our study aimed to develop an econometric model to estimate unmet medical demand, which evaluated the allocation efficiency of regional medical resources and shed light on the associated public policies
Summary
Human health closely affects residential living standards, and the associated human capital of health is one key element of economic growth. Residents tend to maintain their health, which drives the demand for medical services. Residents deserve the same quantity and quality of medical-care services related to the same health issues, which continue unaltered by individual income levels and different locations [1]. The medical-care services industry suffers from asymmetric information [2], and unmet demand is common among residents [3]. 2017 Global Monitoring Report of Tracking Universal Health Coverage in 2017 [4]. This report declared that more than half of the world’s population could not receive basic medical services, and about 800 million residents fell into poverty because of medical spending
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