Impact of China's primary healthcare reforms on utilisation, payments and self-reported health: a quasi-experimental analysis of a middle-aged and older cohort 2011-2018.

BACKGROUND: Comprehensive health reforms aimed at strengthening primary healthcare (PHC) are infrequently adopted and often poorly evaluated in low-income and middle-income countries. China launched a system-wide PHC reform with a staggered roll-out between 2014 and 2018 with multiple components: (1) gatekeeping via tiered reimbursement, (2) a family physician scheme and (3) a two-way referral system between PHC facilities and hospitals. This study examines the reform impacts on health service utilisation, out-of-pocket expenditures, health outcomes and health inequalities.

METHODS: The staggered roll-out of the reforms in 125 cities across China was identified using web-scraping. Using longitudinal data (2011-2018) from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (a cohort aged ≥45), this study adopted a difference-in-differences method to assess the reform's impacts on: (1) visits to PHC facilities, (2) hospitalisation, (3) out-of-pocket expenditures (OOPEs) and (4) self-reported health. Subgroup analyses were conducted by rural/urban populations and wealth quartiles.

RESULTS: The reform had small and short-lived impacts-a 7.8% increase in the probability of visiting PHC facilities (95% CI 0.3 to 15.2), a 10.2% increase in reporting good health (95% CI 0.6 to 19.8) and an 873.9 Chinese Yuan (US$129.1) increase in average annual OOPEs (95% CI 57.9 to 1689.9) in the first year of reform implementation. There was no impact on hospitalisation. Increases in PHC utilisation were only found in rural and lower-income populations.

CONCLUSIONS: China's PHC reforms had some modest, temporary impacts on increasing primary care utilisation and self-reported health. However, further interventions are needed to transition away from the hospital-centric health system and to increase financial protection and health equity in China.