The effects of New Cooperative Medicine Scheme coverage on health outcomes and health care in rural China

The primary objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of New Cooperative Medicine Scheme (NCMS) in rural China, established in 2003, on improving rural residents’ access to health care and health status. Further, we estimate the extent to which NCMS reduce the expense across income groups. Using data from a longitudinal survey, we adopt a triple difference methodology to estimate the causal effect of NCMS. Our results show that NCMS has significantly increased the convenient of health care facility comparing with the non-expose countries, and it also can reduce the outpatient expense for low-middle income group. However, it did not lead to better self-assessed health. Our finding also reveals that the NCMS significantly increase the health care service price.