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Following the implementation of National Health Insurance on March 1, 1995, we found a group of people with a high frequency of health insurance use, who utilized a large share of medical resources. But we do not know what the natures of those people are, and how much medical resources are they taking. Little research has focused on this subject. So our study is intended to explore high-frequency health insurance users. We collected data on 6581 high-frequency health insurance users from the Kao-Ping area, who had used an average 13.8 ±3.8 health insurance cards between March and December of 1995. We found that their average age was 59.9 ±14.4 years old; 49.8% were male and 50.2% female, and the most frequent insurance status was 3rd comprising 42.3% of the subjects. We selected subjects with a relatively high frequency of health insurance use for phone interview, who sought medical services on average every 3.5 days. A total of 987 people were interviewed by phone with a response rate of 72.7%. This sample was 51.7% male with a mean ±SD age of 60.5 ±13.6 years old. Their rate was 44% illiteracy, 76.5% of them were married, 63% semitechnician. Five percent of the sample was issued a special National Health Insurance card for people with severed disease. Of the 987 completed subjects, 43.3% poor health status, They had a mean ±SD 2.0 ±2.1 diagnosed chronic diseases per person. The most common diseases reported were hypertension, gastroenteric disease, arthritis, catartact, and heart disease, They also had an average mean ±SD of 2.9 ±2.1 self-assessed symptoms per person, including pains in the loins and back, and headache. The proportion that reported visiting a doctor when feeling unwell was 93.2%, 81.4% were able to visit the doctor by themselves, 72.2% usually visited the doctor at the same place and 67.8% regularly visited the same doctor. The most common conditions for which the study subjects sought ambulatory care using their Health Insurance cards were: cold (32.5%), gastroenteric disease (16.5%), hypertension (16.2%), pains in the loins and back (12.5%), headache (11.9%), heart disease (11.4%), and arthritis (10.6%). The average subject had visited a physician 2.94 ±3.08 times in the past two weeks and proportion with at least one visit was 76.1%. The average number 0.25 ±0.88 times Chinese medicine physician visits in the past two weeks and the visit-rate was 11.4%. The average subject had 0.88 ±1.72 hospital admissions in the past year and the admission-rate was 29.8%. The subjects had a mean ±SD 0.71 ±1.69 emergency service visits in the past year and this rate was 76.1%. Rehabilitation services rate was 22.6%, and 64.6% of all began to use this service after universal health insurance. The proportion of subjects expressing satisfaction with the overall health insurance program was 62.8%∼68%, and the proportion expressing un-satisfaction was 4.5%∼6.5%. So we can found this sample were low education and professional elderly and they had average five disease and symptoms. More than 50% of those sampled used medical care with their Health Insurance cards for common colds. So this investigation suggests that this population should be provided with more information about health care, especially the health benefits of exercise. Additionally, to establish the hospital file to supervise the normal treatment behaviors of hospital and clinic.
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