Valuing healthcare under Taiwan’s national health insurance

Abstract

This paper provides a new assessment of the most recent premium policy – the second-generation National Health Insurance (NHI) policy under Taiwan’s NHI system. The willingness to pay (WTP) value for a universal coverage NHI plan is NT$201 per month and NT$940 per month for an individual level and for a household level, respectively. We find that the WTP rate is approximately 3.89% of monthly household income, consistent with the range of the new premium rate (2.5–4% of monthly household income) proposed by Taiwan’s government. However, the regressive effect of the new premium policy is significant, suggesting that policy makers may consider other policy alternatives such as subsidy to the lower income for healthcare to eliminate the possible regressive effect of the second-generation-NHI premium policy.

Keywords::

• second-generation national health insurance
• Taiwan
• Wilcoxon signed-rank test
• willingness to pay

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for their helpful comments.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

This research was supported by grants from the National Science Council (NSC-96–2415-H-001-SSS) in Taiwan. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.