Research Of Long Term Care Insurance’s Impacts On Medical Expenditure Of Moderately And Severely Disabled Elderly

Since China entered the 21st century,we have become an aging society,and China’s aging has a rapid trend.As of 2019,there are 176.03 million elderly people over 65 in China,and the proportion of the elderly over 65 in the total population of China has already reached 12.6%.At the same time,the repaid growth of China’s aging population and the increase in average life expectancy have also led to more and more disabled elderly people in China now.So,how to solve the care problems of these disabled elderly so that they can truly enjoy their twilight years,live a truly dignified old age,and meet the care needs of disabled families has increasingly become a concern of the domestic government.In this context,the Chinese government has been piloting the long-term care insurance since 2012.And in 2016,15 cities including Shanghai,were selected as pilot cities for long-term care insurance in order to solve the problem of care for disabled elderly people.So far,China’s long-term care insurance has been piloted for several years,and some scholars have also begun to try to study the policy impact of the long-term care insurance.The society and government also want to understand its impact,so as to provide suggestions for further long-term care pilot policies.In this context,we try to study the impact of the long-term care insurance on the medical consumption behavior of the disabled elderly.we start from the traditional Anderson medical service utilization model,and builds an intermediary effect model on this basis to analyze the influence path of the long-term care insurance.Since the long-term care insurance directly subsidizes formal care services,we have chosen the directly related formal and informal care services as intermediary variables to study the path of the long-term care insurance on the medical expenses of the disabled elderly;In addition,since the long-term care insurance not only provides subsidies,but also provides health training for Caregiver and the disabled elderly’s families,we also choose the health needs as intermediary variables to study the path of the long-term care insurance on the medical expenses of the disabled elderly.Finally,we use the cross-sectional data of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey(CLHLS)in 2018,and take Shanghai’s moderately and above disabled elderly as the judgment condition of the long-term care insurance.We found that: The long-term care insurance will rapidly expand the medical expenses of the disabled elderly;The long-term care insurance has a greater impact on inpatient medical expenses than outpatient medical expenses;Moreover,the longterm care insurance increased the medical expenses of the disabled elderly by influencing the disabled elderly to use more formal care services and improving the path of their health needs;Finally,the long-term care insurance has a heterogeneous effect on the medical expenses of the moderately and severely disabled elderly,The expansion of inpatient medical expenses for the moderately disabled elderly is lower than that of the severely disabled elderly,and outpatient medical expenses didn’t increase rapidly like the severely disabled elderly.