The Impact Of Spouse Health Status And Changes On Residents’ Purchase Of Supplementary Medical Insurance

With the rapid development of the economy and the continuous increase of residents’ income,people’s risk awareness has been continuously improved,and the demand for health protection has become more diversified.However,with the gradual clear positioning of the basic medical insurance "guarantee basics",high-level and diversified protection needs still need to be supplemented by medical insurance.However,at present,China’s supplementary medical insurance market is still in its infancy,and residents are not willing to purchase commercial medical insurance.This paper focuses on the mechanism and effect of spouse health status and its changes on residents’,purchase of supplementary medical insurance,and explores whether the spouse’s disease risk event affects residents,disease risk perception,which in turn affects their decision to purchase supplementary medical insurance.Specifically,this paper uses the China Family Panel Studies(CFPS)survey data for 2014 and 2016 to conduct empirical tests using the Logit model,the fixed effect model,and the DID/PSM-DID model.The conclusions of the study are:1.At a static time point,the worse the health of the spouse,the more likely the residents are to purchase supplementary medical insurance.Compared with people whose spouse health status is low and their medical expenses are low,residents whose spouse health status is general and medical expenses are medium are more likely to purchase supplementary medical insurance,but the impacts of poor spouse’s health status and high medical expenses are not significant.This paper argues that when a spouse suffers from a serious illness,the ability to purchase insurance may be affected,which partly offsets the driving effect of risk perception on insurance purchases.2.From a dynamic perspective,the spouse’s health status becoming worse has a significant effect on residents’ purchase of supplementary medical insurance.This paper uses a weight change of 20 kg or more to measure health deterioration,and we use the fixed effect model,the DID and PSM-DID model for detail regression.It is found that the spouse’s health status becoming worse will lead to an l%-2%increase in the probability of residents purchasing supplementary medical insurance.This shows that after the impact of the spouse’s suffering illness,our subj ective risk perception increases,which makes people more likely to purchase supplementary medical insurance.3.Results show that there is still a weak adverse selection phenomenon in China’s supplementary medical insurance market.The DID and PSM-DID models show that suffering from chronic diseases will increase the probability of residents purchasing supplementary medical insurance by 0.4%,but the impact of other health indicators of residents is not sign i ficant.To a certain extent,this indicates that resident’s own disease risk has a limited role in promoting insurance purchases,for insurance companies will adopt a series of measures to eliminate high-risk groups.Based on the above conclusions,this paper proposes the following recommendations for insurance companies to expand the market.Firstly,insurance companies should target groups associated with risk accidents as target customers.Secondly,they should strengthen residents’ risk awareness and understanding of insurance functions.Finally,underwriting inspection and risk prevention should still be taken seriously.