ZHANG Yu, LI Kaili, WANG Jinting
Privatization reform is regarded as an effective strategy to reduce waiting times in the public healthcare system. This paper focuses on two modes of privatization reform: One is the competition mode, which allows private hospitals to enter the market and compete with public hospitals; the other is the collaboration mode, where public hospitals and private hospitals cooperate to achieve common goals. This paper employs a queueing model to describe the patient consultation process, analyzes the service rates and prices of public and private hospitals under different privatization reforms, and studies the impact of these reforms on the number of patients covered by medical services, patient waiting times, patient welfare and social welfare. The study finds that the competitive mode can significantly reduce patient waiting time, thereby expanding the number of patients covered by medical services and enhancing patient utility and social welfare. In contrast, while the cooperative mode can also reduce patient waiting time, it exhibits uncertainty in increasing the number of patients, patient utility, and social welfare, and can effectively promote the expansion of the number of patients covered by medical services, patient utility, and social welfare only when the service capacity of public-private partnership hospitals is relatively large or the degree of privatization is high. Finally, when private hospitals choose between the cooperative or competitive mode, it mainly depends on the subsidy rate provided by the government to public hospitals and the level of privatization pursued by public-private partnership hospitals for their own interests. Specifically, when the subsidy rate or the level of privatization is high, private hospitals are more inclined to choose the cooperative mode; conversely, they are more inclined to choose the competitive mode.
