The 26th Xi Xian Forum on Income Distribution and Public Finance, co-organised by IIDPF and the Institute of Public Finance and Taxation, was successfully held on 29 September 2022 in Conference Room 119, Wenqin Building. As the keynote speaker of the 26th Xi Xian Forum, Dr Zhang Chuanchuan, a researcher at the School of Economics, Zhejiang University, was invited to deliver a keynote speech on "Distributional Consequences of Hospital Heterogeneous Responses to a Blended Payment Scheme Reform". The forum was chaired by Professor Lu Yuanping, Executive Deputy Director of IIDPF, and was attended by Professor Sun Qunli, Deputy Director, and over 30 faculty members and students of IIDPF through online and offline approaches.
Along with the expanding pressure on health insurance fund revenues and expenditures, how to effectively control medical expenses has become a major challenge worldwide. In this context, a series of health insurance payment reforms have been carried out in China, among which payment by disease points has become one of the important directions of reform. Based on a standard double-difference model setup, Dr. Chuanchuan Zhang investigates the responses of provincial and municipal hospitals to the combination of total budget and per-patient sub-value payment before and after the reform, using the 2016 total urban employee health insurance payment control reform in Changsha as an exogenous policy shock. The findings show that this policy incentivised hospitals to raise revenue through multiple channels, such as unreasonable diagnosis and shifting treatment, and that the reform led to a further widening of the income and expenditure gap between hospitals.
Dr. Zhang Chuanchuan's speech aroused the interest and resonance of the faculty and students present, who actively exchanged and discussed issues around research design and mechanism of action.