The Unmet Medical Demand among China’s Urban Residents

Abstract

Our work aimed to build a reasonable proxy for unmet medical demands of China’s urban residents. We combined health demand modeling and stochastic frontier analysis to produce a frontier medical demand function, which allowed us to disentangle unmet medical demands from the unobservable effects. We estimated unmet medical demands by using China’s provincial dataset that covered 2005–2018. Our estimates showed that unmet medical demand at the national level was 12.6% in 2018, and regions with high medical prices confronted more unmet medical demands than regions with moderate or low medical prices during 2005–2018. Furthermore, medical prices and education were the main factors that affected unmet medical demand; therefore, policy making should pay more attention to reducing medical costs and promoting health education.