Taiwan's National Health Insurance System: Regional Disparities and Effects

For those of you interested in health care policy, I stumbled across this scholarly article on Taiwan's NHI system while playing with Google's new blog search feature. From the abstract:

Results
An individual who was older, female, married, unemployed, better educated, richer, head of a larger family household, or living in the central and eastern areas was more likely to have greater household out-of-pocket medical expenditures. NHI was found to have effectively reduced household out-of-pocket medical expenditures by 23.08%, particularly for more affluent households. With the implementation of NHI, lower and middle income quintiles had smaller decreases in out-of-pocket medical expenditure. NHI was also found to have reduced household out-of-pocket medical expenditures more for households in eastern Taiwan.

Conclusion

Although NHI was established to create free medical care for all, further effort is needed to reduce the medical costs for certain disadvantaged groups, particularly the poor and aborigines, if equality is to be achieved.

[Taiwan]