Research On The Influence Of The Structure Of China’s Commercial Health Insurance Market On The Market Size

With the acceleration of urbanization in China,the growth of middle-income groups and the transformation and upgrading of consumption structure,people’s health awareness is constantly increasing,and the demand for health insurance is increasing.At the same time,national favorable policies are continuously introduced,and China’s health insurance industry has entered a fast track.However,the development of commercial health insurance still has problems such as inadequate development and unbalanced development.The current development of commercial health insurance cannot fully meet people’s protection needs,which indicates that China’s health insurance needs further development and the market scale needs to be further expanded.The SCP framework of the theory of industrial organization holds that market structure determines market behavior,and market behavior determines market performance,so market structure will influence or even determine market size through market behavior.To this end,this article analyzes the current situation and empirical research on the impact of China’s health insurance market structure on the market size to explore whether the market structure has an impact on the market size and how much.The SCP framework,monopoly competition theory,and natural monopoly industry theory in industrial economics form the theoretical basis of this article.The structure of the insurance market mainly affects the market size through the degree of insurance market concentration,the degree of insurance product differentiation,and the entry and exit barriers of the insurance market.In addition to the market structure,the size of the health insurance market is also affected by factors such as the level of economic development,social security funds and health care spending,population aging,and urbanization.The development of China’s health insurance has gone through three stages: preliminary development,rapid development,and professional operation.Analysis of market concentration and other indicators shows that the market structure of China’s health insurance belongs to the middle-low concentration oligopoly;the market structure of the eastern,central,and western regions is quite different.Beijing,Shanghai,and other cities in the east are already competitive markets.Tibet and Guizhou also belong to the market of high widows.At the same time,the overall scale of China’s health insurance market is constantly expanding,but regional disparities are also large.By selecting provincial panel data of the health insurance market in each region from 2009 to 2018,taking health insurance premium income as the explanatory variable and market concentration as the explanatory variable,and selecting the total regional economic development,per capita education years,and old-age support Ratio,per capita health care expenditure,urban employee medical insurance fund expenditure,urbanization rate and other indicators as control variables.Construct a linear regression model to conduct an empirical analysis of China’s commercial health insurance market structure and market size.The empirical results show that China’s health insurance is currently in a low-to-medium oligopolistic market,and the degree of market competition has a positive correlation with market size.After comparison between the eastern,central,and western regions,the optimization of market structure has the greatest effect on promoting health insurance in western regions.According to the results of the study,put forward feasibility suggestions on promoting the development of the health insurance market on the two levels of insurance companies and industry supervision.Insurance companies can start by improving their professional operation capabilities,focusing on product innovation,technology application,and raising residents’ awareness of insurance;the government can promote by regulating market competition,improving market competition mechanisms through legal means,and reducing entry and exit barriers.Health insurance will better play the role of social security.