Abstract: By making use of the data of China Family Panel Studies（CFPS）in 2014 and from the perspective of residents’ coping with and preventing diseases, this paper makes a systematical analysis of the factors influencing the urban and rural medical expenditure differences from the two dimensions of macro environment and micro individual endowment with the method of stepwise logistic regression. Then, it controls the affecting factors under investigation and applies the method of propensity score matching（PSM）to analyze the medical expenditure difference between urban and rural residents in coping with and preventing diseases. The findings show that there exists a significant difference in medical consumptions between urban and rural residents. It is mainly reflected in the fact that the rural residents’ responsive medical expense is 10.08% higher than that of urban residents, while the preventive medical expenditure of urban residents is 89.68% higher than that of rural residents. Such factors as doctor-visiting points, education level, health conditions, income and regional conditions can effectively narrow the differences of responsive and preventive medical expenditures between urban and rural residents.

Key words: medical expenditure; differences between urban and rural areas; propensity score matching