Changes in Health Care Utilization and Costs During the 2024 Medical Strike in Korea: Evidence From a Specialty-Level...

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted health care utilization worldwide, followed by uneven recovery patterns. South Korea also experienced this recovery disruption due to the nationwide medical strike in 2024. Especially, this medical strike raised concerns about the vulnerability and instability of the national health care system amid supply-side shocks during the post-crisis recovery. Its impacts and aftermaths need to be analyzed and evaluated for the latter response. In this article, we investigated changes in health care utilization and costs using National Health Insurance claims data across 6 phases: pre-COVID (2018-2019), early COVID (2020), mid-COVID (2021), late COVID (2022), recovery (2023), and the 2024 medical strike. In this work, we found that health care utilization declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, partially rebounded in 2023, and declined again during the 2024 strike. On the contrary, aggregate and per-patient health care expenditures increased during the recovery period and remained elevated during the strike despite reduced patient volumes. Per-patient expenditures rose most prominently in surgical and emergency-related specialties. We confirmed our results, suggesting that health care recovery may remain fragile and susceptible to subsequent supply-side disruptions. They also highlighted the need for specialty-sensitive monitoring and policy responses to support system resilience and patient financial protection.