讲座主题：The Full Price of Care: Public Transit and Healthcare Access

主讲嘉宾：刘逸楠 中国人民大学应用经济学院助理教授

讲座时间：2026年5月28日周四14:30

讲座地点：中央财经大学沙河校区11号楼308会议室

嘉宾简介：刘逸楠，中国人民大学应用经济学院助理教授，主要研究领域为公共经济学、健康经济学、发展经济学。研究聚焦医疗可及性、数字医疗、健康与福利等议题，相关成果发表于Journal of Environmental Economics and Management、Journal of Comparative Economics、Health Economics、Journal of International Money and Finance等期刊。

内容摘要：For many insured patients, the binding constraint on healthcare access is not the medical bill but the physical cost of reaching a provider. We show that public transit can overcome this nonfinancial friction and function as a powerful substitute for traditional demand-side health subsidies. We exploit the staggered rollout of scheduled bus services across 171 villages in rural China. Because medical prices are administratively fixed in this setting, the transit reform isolates the causal effect of travel costs on healthcare demand. Using the universe of patient claims, we estimate that bus access increases outpatient visits by 26.5 percent. This expansion operates on margins that traditional price subsidies typically miss. The reform draws previously untreated individuals into formal care and improves visit regularity for chronic patients. Placing both policy instruments on a common fiscal scale, we show that replicating this transit effect would require cutting existing medical copayments by 53 percent. These findings demonstrate that the effective return to health insurance ultimately depends on the physical infrastructure connecting patients to care.