Study On The Impact Of Air Pollution On Health Insurance Demand

For a long time,although our country’s economic modernization has accumulated fruitful results,the extensive economic growth in the past period of time has made our country’s environmental pollution problem very serious.Environmental risks,especially air pollution,which is dominated by haze,are key factors that induce residents’ health needs,and health insurance is an important tool for hedging health risks.Therefore,studying the relationship between air pollution and health insurance demand is of great significance for protecting national health.However,few scholars at home and abroad directly discuss the relationship between air pollution and health insurance,and the only literature does not have a clear conclusion on whether air pollution has a significant direct promotion effect on health insurance.In order to further study the impact of air pollution on health insurance demand,this article combs the domestic and foreign literature on health insurance research,and establishes an econometric model by collecting panel data from 283 prefecture-level cities and above from 2006 to 2016,to study the impact of air pollution on health insurance demand and explore the internal mechanism of air pollution on health insurance demand.First,the instrumental variable regression and the spatial self-lagging model(SLX)are used to measure the impact of air pollution and its externalities on health insurance demand.The research results show that: First,air pollution has a significant direct promotion effect on health insurance demand.After the use of instrumental variables to alleviate the endogenous problem of the model,this positive effect is more obvious.Second,air pollution not only has a significant direct promotion effect on health insurance demand,but also has a significant positive spatial spillover effect.Secondly,with the help of Baidu’s big data,the mediation effect model was used to empirically test the mechanism of air pollution affecting health insurance demand.The results of the study show that the level of risk perception measured by the Baidu Index plays a significant intermediary role between air pollution and health insurance demand.This mechanism well explains the statistical phenomenon that there is a positive correlation between health insurance demand and air pollution.This paper found that air pollution directly promotes the demand for commercial health insurance,and the spatial spillover effect of air pollution on health insurance demand also exists.In addition,this paper also verifies that the level of risk perception is an intermediary variable that air pollution affects health insurance demand.The above research results provide a decision-making reference for our country’s medical and health reform and the development of the health insurance market.