Research On The Impact Of Commercial Medical Insurance On The Financial Vulnerability Of Chinese Urban And Rural Households

The financial crisis that broke out in 2007 made household financial issues a hot topic in academia.As a risk measurement index,household financial vulnerability can assess the household’s ability to cope with risk shocks based on comprehensive consideration of household asset allocation and reflect short-term household financial problems.Due to the limited protection of traditional preventive savings and the government-led basic security system,commercial medical insurance has become an important tool for households to further diversify and transfer health risks.With the development of the commercial insurance industry and the continuous improvement of national awareness,households’ demand for commercial medical insurance has gradually increased.Understanding the generation mechanism of household financial vulnerability and analyzing the impact of commercial medical insurance and other factors on household financial vulnerability will help improve the household’s risk awareness,realize the rational allocation of assets,and enhance the household’s ability to cope with risk shocks.This article first summarizes the existing literature,and on the basis of existing research,analyzes the generation mechanism of household financial vulnerability and the impact mechanism of commercial medical insurance on household financial vulnerability.Second,different from the existing literature that uses post-event indicators to measure financial vulnerability,this paper uses the probability of households in financial distress under uncertainty risk as a pre-index to measure the degree of household financial vulnerability.By establishing household income and medical expenditure equations,and introducing the copula function to describe the dependence of income risk and medical expenditure risk,a household financial vulnerability measurement method that considers both income and medical expenditure uncertainty is constructed.Third,this paper uses the three-phase data of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study(CHARLS)2011,2013,and 2015 to measure the financial vulnerability of urban and rural households.Through statistical analysis,it is found that the household financial vulnerability becomes higher with the lower education years,the poorer health status of the household head and the lower proportion of the labor force.Further,this paper empirically analyzes the impact of commercial medical insurance on the financial vulnerability of urban and rural households in China.In order to overcome the possible reverse causality and omission variables in the model,this article uses the commercial medical insurance purchase rate of the city where the household is located.The instrumental variable of whether the household participates in commercial medical insurance is estimated by two-stage least squares;in order to deal with the endogenous problem caused by self-selection,this article uses the treatment effect model to estimate.The research results show that,regardless of urban or rural households,commercial medical insurance has a significant effect on reducing household financial vulnerability,and the results are still stable after dealing with endogenous problems.Finally,this article summarizes the full text on the basis of the above-mentioned research,and puts forward corresponding suggestions from the three aspects of household,enterprise,and government in combination with the actual situation of China.