Research On Influential Factors Of Chinese Urban Residents In Healthcare Expenditure

As one of the basic needs, healthcare expenditure is of great importance to people’s livelihood, which keeps increasing in our country with the development of the economy and the growth of the income as well as the change of people’s mind since reform and opening up. However, there are still some problems in our country, such as uneven distribution of medical resources, non-universal coverage of medical insurance and unsound medical system, which leads to heavy burden on our residents. Thus, we want to study influential factors of our urban residents in healthcare expenditure, in order to find out some resolutions to ease their burden.The first part analyzes the current medical situation. Though Chinese medical industry develops rapidly, there is still a large gap between our country and developed countries, and structurally speaking, most of the expenditure is borne by the residents, which leads to the great burden. What’s more, it clarifies a fact that the medical system in our country is urgent to be improved because of the growing threat of population aging and slow growth as well as uneven distribution of medical resources.Based on former researches, combined with our national condition, the second part qualitatively analyzes the influences of five influential factors, namely, population aging, residents’ income, government expenditure, healthcare price and educational level, on Chinese residents in healthcare expenditure. However, we cannot determine the specific impact due to the positive and negative influence of these factors, thus there is a need to do a further quantitative analysis.The third part is the quantitative analysis using Fixed-effect Model. We also did comparative analysis between regions. It turns out that all the factors have significant impacts on residents’ healthcare expenditure from both national and regional level, except price on that of middle and western residents, and educational level on that of middle residents.The last part summarizes the regression results and formulates some policy suggestions. Firstly, pay highly attention to population aging in our country, trying to ease burden from this aspect. Secondly, raise residents’ income to make them afford healthcare expenditure. Thirdly, enhance governmental administration to increase its public health expenditure and tighten its control on medical prices. Lastly, improve the educational level and residents’ opinion toward healthcare. Besides, we also come up with corresponding suggestions according to different conditions in four regions.