ABSTRACT
This study aims to fill important research gaps. First, because nearly all prior research focuses on the community-level medical institutions, this study aims to contribute to the literature on evaluations of the zero-markup policy at the level of county hospitals. Second, most previous research only collected data in the treatment group to conduct pre-post comparison, which lacks scientific rigor in evaluating the policy. In order to overcome the limitations in the previous research, the current study evaluates two public county-level hospitals, in which one hospital has implemented the zero-markup policy (treatment group) and the other has not implemented the policy (control group). In Section 2, the study methodology will be discussed. Section 3 will uncover the results, with specific attention to the impact of the zero-markup policy on health care provision and hospital medical revenue as well as fiscal compensation. The results are discussed and interpreted in Section 4. In this section, the limitations of the study are also presented. Lastly, Section 5 concludes with summary points and policy recommendations.
