Integration Of China's Medical Insurance

The right of health belongs to every citizen; all social members should not be discriminated because of the different factors such as social status, income, geographical features, gender and age. Every member of society is entitled to choose their own medical insurance system according to their economic capacity, which is an equal opportunity issue. Covering all people by several medical insurance systems is the goal of new health reform in China. As the trends of urban-rural integration development and household registry reform, it begins to bring up the thought of the true unified basic health insurance and discuss the necessity from the viewpoint of social politics and economics. There are many problems in China's current health insurance market, such as coverage is not broad, vulnerable groups are not covered by medical insurance and services and use of the health insurance is imbalance. However, the problem of coverage is the most prominent problem. Based on theory of the equality of opportunity and definition of the concept of comprehensive health care, from the perspective of equal opportunities, in my paper, I analyze the lack of equality in the health insurance system, using the Probit model to analyze the different factors on the impact of health insurance and provide some policy recommendations about the path for realize a comprehensive health insuranceIn my paper, I describe the formation of China's medical insurance system and the development trend of the main course, through historical analysis of the changes of urban and rural medical insurance system by longitudinal comparison; describe the basic facts of urban and rural differences in the fairness of health care services using method of comparative analysis. This article puts forward the necessity of universal health care from the point of equality of baseline, and analyzes some examples of foreign countries who have already to achieve a successful universal health care, define the concept of universal health care and three main ways to achieve universal coverage currently. There are three levels of equality of baseline, the first level, named equal opportunity, which is the threshold of universal health care and basic requirements. Empirical part of the article using date from 1989 to 2009, which made eight CHNS survey data as the basis, through the establishment of Probit model, from many factors such as the personal characteristics, regional characteristics, occupational characteristics and income, analyze the main factors which may affect the behavior of insuring medical insurance, and the distribution of the group of the medical insurance in different characteristics. The empirical results show that there is a clear unfairness in China's health insurance system. Participating behavior is mainly affected by age, gender, occupational characteristics and educational levels; participating behavior is not affected by the factor of urban and rural areas. There is a tremendous paradox about the conclusion compared to the past literatures which consider that the health insurance coverage in rural and urban areas exists a huge difference. To the extreme extent, this is due to the implementation of NCMS and because the survey data is only concerned about the coverage of the medical insurance, the depth difference of the urban and rural health care can not reflect in a fair way. Years of education is the most influential factors about involvement of health insurance, educational factors restrict a person's emphasis on health insurance and purchasing power from direct and indirect aspects, the article puts forwards some policy recommendations for strengthening national education and suggests that high levels of education by improving the overall quality of the population can promote the health insurance market. Finally, I put forward about the reform of the medical insurance market. Based on the three networks of the basic medical insurance system for urban employees, basic medical insurance system for urban residents and the new rural cooperative medical insurance system, we can realize the universal health care system step by step through "three nets to two nets", and then "two nets to one net".This innovation of my article is that:In considering the factors which impact the participation of health insurance, the choice of population, geography, occupation, income and other demographic characteristics and economic characteristics, coincide with the research field of foreign perspective, and based on the previous studies, I add the professional characteristics as the influencing factors, this is innovative; meanwhile, empirical analysis of data comes from China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), sample volume is huge, and compared to data got from the domestic researchers on field research, statistical data from websites, the data from CHNS are more detailed. And foreign researchers in the study of China are widespread using this database. The selected data are from 1989, through 8 survey, the latest data update to 2009; due to updates of data 2009 was too late that domestic researchers generally select the data from CHNS to 2006. This paper using the data updated to 2009, it can be more representative of the basic situation of the domestic, and the empirical study are more convincing.