Medical insurance and expenditure thresholds for Vietnamese patient satisfaction with healthcare services

This short communication report some new results obtained from a medical survey among 900 Vietnamese patients. Both income and medical expenditure have positive influence to improving patient satisfaction. But insurance reimbursement rate has negative influence. Patients with residency status are more demanding than those without. The more seriously ill, the less patients find the health services to be satisfactory. The probability of satisfaction conditional on insurance reimbursement is lower for patients with residency status, and higher for those without. There exist thresholds of income, expenditures and insurance reimbursement rate, surpassing which probabilistic trends switch. The expenditure threshold for resident patients is almost three times that for nonresidents. The computed “insurance threshold” exists only within the group of non-resident patients, ~65%, suggesting that getting a reimbursement rate higher than this can be very difficult. Therefore, the government's ambitious goal of universal coverage may be both unrealistic and too rigid as patients with different conditions show different perceptions toward healthcare services.