The Impact Of Commercial Health Insurance On Household Economic Vulnerability

Due to the impact of various risk shocks and inadequate risk response capacity,large proportion of households are in a state of severe vulnerability.As a kind of risk shock,health shock has an important impact on family’s consumption and welfare.As a risk coping resource,healthy human capital is an important support for families to get out of the fragile state.As an efficient measure to deal with health shocks,commercial health insurance helps to avoid families falling into a fragile state due to illness by compensating medical expenses,but its non-saving and non-universal nature will also make insured families face greater vulnerability when they suffer from other risk shocks.Because of the existence of two conflicting effects,commercial health insurance may theoretically have a differentiated impact on the economic vulnerability of households with different characteristics.Determining the impact of commercial health insurance on family economic vulnerability and clarifying its coverage of work will help families take suitable measures to manage their health shock according to its characteristics,and on the other hand,optimize the division of labor between commercial health insurance and social medical insurance,fully coordinate the role of the government and the market,and enhance the ability of the medical and health system to guarantee the national health level.Given the background of theory and practice,we analyze the effects of commercial health insurance on family economic vulnerability.Firstly,drawing on existing literature,this paper constructs and decomposes household economic vulnerability with health risks.Secondly,CFPS2014,2016,and 2018 balanced panel data were used to estimate conditional expected consumption,estimate and decompose household economic vulnerability,and examine the impact of household characteristics on vulnerability.Finally,we use PSM method to investigate the effects of commercial health insurance on vulnerability,and by grouping of vulnerability and income level,We conducted heterogeneity analysis.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)the estimation and decomposition of vulnerability show that the vast majority of families are fragile and relative poverty is largest source of vulnerability,although the health risks of smaller,but the other risk of heterogeneity of relatively large(2)the insurance effect and non-savings effect are mutually restricted,so that commercial health insurance doesn’t significantly influence the vulnerability of total observations(3)But there exist a different effects on which varies with the vulnerability level: in the high vulnerable group,the non-savings effect dominates,the commercial health insurance deteriorated high vulnerable groups of economic vulnerability;in the moderate and low vulnerability groups,the non-savings effect was inhibited,and commercial health insurance significantly reduced their economic vulnerability.