中文摘要
The integration of China's New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme and Basic Medical Insurance for Urban Residents constitutes a major reform of the country's social medical insurance system. This paper develops an analytical framework for assessing the welfare effects of integrating medical insurance for urban and rural residents and employs the full-information and optimization approaches to structurally estimate and empirically quantify the policy value of this integration. The results show that rural residents' minimum willingness to pay for the integration of urban and rural medical insurance ranges from 689 to 825 yuan and exhibits heterogeneity across groups. This paper provides a basis for evaluating the welfare value of urban–rural medical insurance integration and for making more refined and precisely targeted adjustments to basic medical insurance financing schemes.