The impact of health insurance reform on hospital charges: A comparison of nantong and zibo
In order to control the rapid increase of hospital expenditure in urban areas, different reforms aiming at strengthening the role of the insurers as purchasers of health services have been proposed. These reforms were decided and implemented in the late 1990s as a response to some of the undesirable side effects of increasing autonomy and lack of competition in the hospital sector. This chapter analyses the impact of the recent reform of the new urban health insurance scheme by comparing Zibo and Nantong. During the late 1990s Nantong introduced new tools for controlling the providers. Following the results in Chapter 9, this chapter uses a tracer methodology where charges and utilization for two medical conditions, acute appendicitis and birth delivery, are examined and an effort is made to identify the determinants of observed differences in the performance.
