The impact of National Health Insurance on birth outcomes: A natural experiment in Taiwan
利用台湾1995年全民健康保险实施的自然实验，发现该政策使农户家庭婴儿的后期死亡率降低8%-16%，但对私营部门家庭无显著影响。
We estimate the impacts of the introduction of National Health Insurance in Taiwan in March 1995 on infant survival. Prior to NHI, government workers (the control group) possessed health insurance policies with comprehensive coverage for births and infant medical care services. Private sector industrial workers and farmers (the treatment groups) lacked this coverage. All households received coverage in 1995. Since stringent requirements for reporting births introduced in 1994 produced artificial upward trends in early infant deaths, we focus on postneonatal mortality. The introduction of NHI led to reductions in this rate for infants born in farm households but not for infants born in private sector households. For the former group, the rate fell by between 0.3 and 0.6 deaths per thousand survivors or by between 8 and 16%. A large decline of between 3.4 and 6.8 deaths occurred for pre-term infants—a drop of between 20 and 41%.