• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.378-389
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• 2013

Health care expenditure might be understood as a core source of social welfare. It is mainly due to the fact that the health care expenditure is closely related to the level of social welfare. And, therefore, the paper is basically designed to investigate the effect of social welfare improvement resulted from an increasing in per capita, private, public, and total health care expenditures during 1995-2009 periods. Empirical evidence reveals that the improvement of social welfare in middle income group reveals the highest improvement in social welfare, and the other income groups maintain a quite similar pattern in improvement of social welfare. As far as category of health care expenditure concerns, the effect of social welfare improvement by per capita health care expenditure is in general lower in all case. And, private sector achieves the highest improvement of social welfare in comparing with public and total health care expenditures. To this end, it could be tentatively concluded that the private health care expenditure has to be substituted for the public sector to induce market-oriented operational system. Accordingly, it would be better to build an institutional basis more elaborately in setting up the market system.