Rural Elderly Population In Economic Conditions Impact On Health And Medical Resource Utilization

With the investigation data on Chinese Support System for the Elderly, this dissertation researches the influence of rural elderly's economic situation to their health and their use of medical resources.According to the features of the data used in my dissertation, I take three indexes as the elderly health variables, which are self-ranked health, comprehensive ability to maintain self-independence and chronic. Payout for medical treatment and frequency of consulting doctor are also considered as the variable of the elderly's use of medical resources. According to the economic theory of health input, this dissertation divides the influence of the relationship between economic-health/medical resources into two parts: the influence of domestic economic situation and of community economic situation. Meanwhile, considering the complexity of the factors that give influence on the elderly's health, I also enroll 8 non-economic factors such as the elderly's age, sex, number of their children, educational experience, their children's filial piety, nation and their living clime as the variables be controlled.As the result of practical research, this dissertation comes to the conclusion that the economic situation is the most influential factor which functions on the elderly' s health and their use of medical resources. A conspicuous monotonic increase could be found in the influence of domestic economic situation to the elderly' s health and their use of medical resources. Accompanied with the improvement of domestic economic situation, the input in health and the output thereof are increased. In the poorest family the use of medical resources is the lowest, and their risk of unhealthy is the highest. The community economic situation' s influence on the elderly' s health and their use of medical resources depends on different situations: the elderly in undeveloped or developing community have the highest risk of unhealthy, while the elderly in the most undeveloped community have comparatively high payout for their medical treatment, which means that the influence of community economy might give an interactive influence: on one hand, economic development in community might leads to the elderly' s unhealthy condition in it (which might functions through the changes in environment); on the other hand, it also works on the payout for medical treatment and the medicine fee (which might functions through the supply of sanitation resources in side the community). It also comes out that domestic factors such as family situation are very important to the elderly' s health and their use of medical resources in rural areas.