ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Policy
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1524984
This article is part of the Research TopicPublic Health Outcomes: The Role of Social Security Systems in Improving Residents' Health WelfareView all 45 articles
Community health care integration and fiscal expenditures: Evidence from a synthetic control approach
Provisionally accepted
- 1Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha, China
- 2Hunan Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), Changsha, Hunan, China
- 3Zhejiang Agriculture and Forestry University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China
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Does the implementation of community healthcare integration policies affect fiscal expenditures as a key measure in addressing older healthcare demands and promoting healthy aging? This study utilizes the implementation of community healthcare integration in Yantai, a prefecture-level city in China, as a natural experiment to analyze its fiscal expenditure consequences by using the synthetic control approach. Our empirical findings indicate that the program implementation markedly decreased fiscal expenditures in pilot cities. The decrease in expenditure is solely due to policy execution, with no confounding variables detected. The program implementation negatively impacted fiscal expenditures mainly by decreasing government healthcare spending in pilot zones. Consequently, in the ongoing effort to enhance community healthcare integration, local governments must devise context-tailored implementation strategies to attain sustainable growth, alleviate fiscal burdens, and improve elderly care services.
Keywords: community health care integration, Government expenditure, Health care expenditure, Synthetic controls, Robustness tests
Received: 08 Nov 2024; Accepted: 07 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Xiang, Zhong, Lei and Liu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Long Qing Liu, Zhejiang Agriculture and Forestry University, Hangzhou, 311300, Zhejiang Province, China
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