Effects of Drug Price Changes on Patient Expenditure: Evidence from China’s Zero Markup Drug Policy

Table 2

The effect of the ZMDP on patient expenditure.

	Total expenditure	Reimbursable expenditure	Out-of-pocket expenditure	Out-of-pocket expenditure ratio
	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)
Panel A: outpatient
ZMDP	−0.27 (0.04)	−0.28 (0.05)	−0.79 (0.25)	−0.14 (0.03)
N	20,491.145	21,052.088	21,047.900	21,645.847
R2	0.61	0.73	0.68	0.71
Panel B: inpatient
ZMDP	−0.06 (0.03)	−0.09 (0.04)	−0.06 (0.07)	0.00 (0.03)
N	6,109.817	6,113.293	5,363.901	5,462.369
R2	0.66	0.64	0.80	0.69

Note. ZMDP, zero markup drug policy. The coefficients show that the estimated, natural log-transformed dependent variables can be roughly interpreted as the percentage changes before and after the ZMDP’s implementation. The results control for patients’ demographic characteristics, disease type, and physician; they are based on cross-sectional individual data, and the numbers in the parentheses are standard errors clustered at the county level. Panel A presents the ZMDP’s effect on outpatient expenditure; panel B depicts the ZMDP’s effect on inpatient expenditure. , , and denote the significance at the 1%, 5%, and 10% levels, respectively.