Study On The Impact Of Urban And Rural Residents’ Basic Medical Insurance On Multidimensional Relative Poverty Of Rural Middle-aged And Elderly People

Poverty has long been an important challenge for all countries in the world,and the world has made unremitting efforts to eliminate it.With the rapid advancement of the anti-poverty process after the reform and opening up,the number of poor groups has continued to decrease.Under the guidance of the anti-poverty theory with Chinese characteristics,China eliminated absolute poverty at the end of 2020 as scheduled,and China’s poverty alleviation has stepped up to a new level,but this does not mean the final completion of China’s anti-poverty task.The traditional absolute poverty standard,which is measured by a single indicator of income or consumption only,can no longer meet the needs of China’s poverty problem,and the measurement indicators have changed from single-dimensional poverty to multidimensional poverty.As China enters the post-poverty reduction era,the focus of the poverty governance task shifts from addressing absolute poverty to dealing with relative poverty.Compared with absolute poverty,the state of relative poverty in China’s rural areas is more complicated,and relative poverty has become a major constraint that cannot be ignored in consolidating the results of poverty eradication.In the context of promoting the rural revitalization strategy,the focus of China’s poverty governance will shift from eliminating absolute poverty to alleviating multidimensional relative poverty in the future.The next stage of poverty alleviation work in China should not only focus on the multidimensional nature of poverty and the alleviation of relative poverty,but also on the potential poor and those who have escaped from poverty and returned to poverty.Rural areas in China have always been the hardest hit by poverty as well as the high incidence of poverty eradication and return to poverty,and the special characteristics of farmers’ groups make their poverty will not disappear with the elimination of absolute poverty.In particular,the middle-aged and elderly groups in rural areas are relatively less able to resist risks and are extremely vulnerable to poverty,and are likely to return to poverty due to health poverty after getting out of poverty.Since the reform and opening up,China has started to reform its medical insurance system in order to establish a medical insurance system covering the whole population,and in 2016,the State Council integrated the basic medical insurance for urban residents and the new rural cooperative medical insurance system to establish a unified basic medical insurance system for urban and rural residents（hereinafter referred to as "urban and rural residents’ medical insurance"）.This has improved the level of medical protection for urban and rural residents.The implementation and promotion of urban and rural residents’ basic medical insurance has significantly reduced the burden of rural residents’ medical expenses and enhanced their ability to resist disease risks,which can play a positive role in avoiding future poverty,but the effect of poverty reduction during its implementation still needs further evaluation and testing.Based on the data of the China Health and Aging Tracking Survey（CHARLS2013,CHARLS2015,CHARLS2018）,this paper compares a large amount of literature on relative poverty and multidimensional poverty based on absolute poverty theory,viability theory,multidimensional poverty theory and relative poverty theory,and attempts to construct a research framework and We attempted to construct a research framework and measurement system for the multidimensional relative poverty of rural middle-aged and elderly people,in order to complement the relevant research in this area.Based on the A-F double-critical value method,the multidimensional relative poverty measurement system is constructed from three dimensions,and the three dimensions of income,health and subjective welfare are selected and the six indicators under them are explained and described in detail.This paper adopts the propensity score matching method to study the effect of urban and rural basic medical insurance on the multidimensional relative poverty of rural middle-aged and elderly people,and analyzes the poverty reduction effect of urban and rural basic medical insurance among rural middle-aged and elderly people.It was found that（1）the phenomenon of falling into multidimensional relative poverty among rural middle-aged and elderly groups in China is still prevalent,but generally shows a decreasing trend;（2）urban and rural residents’ basic medical insurance has played a significant positive role in improving multidimensional relative poverty among rural middle-aged and elderly;（3）further analysis of the heterogeneity of urban and rural residents’ basic medical insurance for poverty reduction concluded that the poverty reduction for rural elderly groups effect is better than that of the middle-aged group.Based on the empirical results,the following recommendations are proposed: scientific and accurate identification of rural multidimensional relative poverty,promotion of high-quality rural economic development,formulation of scientific and comprehensive medical insurance policies,and "age-appropriate" reform of medical insurance policies.The innovation of this study is that on the one hand,in assessing the poverty reduction effect of urban and rural residents’ basic medical insurance coverage,the propensity score matching method is used,which effectively overcomes the problems of sample self-selection and endogeneity.On the other hand,this paper creatively incorporates relative poverty into the multidimensional poverty indicator system,and tries to build a research framework and measurement system for multidimensional relative poverty among rural middle-aged and elderly people,in order to comprehensively understand the current situation of multidimensional relative poverty among rural middle-aged and elderly people,which is conducive to the precise identification of poverty and fills the relevant research gaps.The shortcomings of this study are as follows: firstly,the selection of indicators is not comprehensive;secondly,the method of assigning weights to the indicator system is not compared with multiple assignment methods,which has certain limitations;finally,due to the lack of the latest data,the empirical results lack a certain degree of persuasiveness,and the current conclusions provided are relatively lacking,which cannot well reflect the effect of the role of basic medical insurance for urban and rural residents.