Objective To investigate the elasticity of demand for health care services in China, and to provide suggestions for further studies. Methods Databases including PubMed, The Cochrane Library (Issue 10, 2015), EMbase, CNKI, VIP and WanFang Data were searched from inception to December 2015 to collect studies about price elasticity or income elasticity of demand for health care services. Literatures were screened and related information was independently extracted by two reviewers. Then qualitative approaches were applied to describe the elasticity. Results A total of 31 studies were included. Estimates of the own-price elasticity of demand for health care services ranged from –2.520 to 2.944 in 25 studies; 2 studies estimated cross-price elasticity between outpatient and inpatient service and one study estimated cross-price elasticity between different levels of inpatient services and all estimates were positive; Estimates of the income elasticity ranged from –0.020 to 2.480 in 28 studies. Demand for inpatient services was more income sensitive than the demand for outpatient services and urban citizens were more sensitive to income than their rural counterparts. Conclusion Health service is insensitive to price and belongs to necessity; inpatient service and outpatient service are substitutes for each other and different levels of inpatient services are substitutes for each other; government are supposed to tackle with the unbalanced increase of the demand of outpatient and inpatient services along with the increase of income to guide rational health-seeking behaviors.
Objectives To estimate the elasticity of demand price elasticity and demand income of urban and rural residents’ self-purchase drug use and expenditure, and to analyze the sensitivity of self-purchase drug use and expenditure to the price change of drug purchase, resident income and medical institutions. Methods The data were derived from the fifth health service survey in Heilongjiang province in 2013. The Probit model was used to obtain the partial regression coefficients of the control variables in the regression model, and the demand elasticity of the self-purchase drug use was further measured by the partial regression coefficients, and the demand elasticity of self-purchase expenditure was obtained by the logarithmic regression model. Results A total of 5 289 households (14 431 persons) were included. The demand for self-purchase drug use of Heilongjiang province was 0.374 (P=0.000), the cross-price elasticity of self-purchase drug utilization and service was –0.184 (P=0.000), and the income elasticity was 0.083 (P=0.172). Since the price elasticity of the self-purchase drug expenditure was 0.675 (P=0.000), the income elasticity was 0.144 (P=0.069). Conclusions The use of self-purchased drugs in Heilongjiang province lacks price elasticity and is a necessity. There is a complementary relationship between the use of self-purchase drugs and medical institutions.