Relationship Between Income And Health Status And Health Care Utilization With Different Income Measurement

To ptotect and promote health status of the people is the aim of health care development. Determinant of health has been a key research area. Economic situation is among the most important factors influencing health. This paper mainly focuses on the factor of income. We intend to talk about the different measurements of income, such as object absolute income, object relative income, subject relative income, wealth index, in order to study the relationship between income and health.According to socio-economic development levels and geographical distribution, adopting cluster stratified random sampling we select four sample counties which are Chi-ping and Caoxian of Shandong province, Anyue of Sichuan province, Linquan of Anhui provinces. 1810 households, 3025 rural residents (7172 family members) were interviewed during the study period. This paper selects 1537 households and 2461 self-answer-people as samples. The questionnaire includes both qualitative and quantitative information. Single factor and Econometrics methods (Engel coefficient, GINI index, Lorenz curve) were used to accomplish the research goal.The main results include 1) 42.9% are male and 57.1% are female in the 2461 samples. Female is more than male since much more mans migrate to the other county in order to earn money to meet the family needs. The age distribution is between 16 and 80. The percentage of people between 30 and 60 are 77.2%, who are the mainly labor in rural area. The younger have more incomes. The education levels are low. 31.7% of interviewees haven't gone to school; 29.9% are primary school; 27.5% are junior high school; only 10.8% are high middle school and above.2) Object absolute income contains the detail of income and consumption. Annual per capita net income is 2982.17 yuan, which is consistent with the whole country level. The agriculture income and labor service income of farmers from outside are the main resources. Consumption on house, medical treatment and education are the main burden to farmers. The low income restricts the consumption of the other needs except food. The Engel's index of the four counties is 0.4, which means their life quality is low.3) The GINI index is 0.441, which exceeds the warning line of 0.4. The income distribution in the rural area is unfair. Because the relative income theory is based on another condition and requires the income level higher than 5000$, the relative income theory is obviously not suitable for this study.4) The results of subject relative income (self-reported income) indicate that the score of self-reported income is skewness distribution, and people are apt to report low score. Comparing the income three years ago and in the future three years, people with lower income have the smaller diversification. The poorer has the lower expected income, while the richer has the higher expected income. When they compare to income of the urban residents, more than half rural residents show that they have never compared to urban residents because of the large gap of income. The rest mainly give the income under the middle level comparing with the urban resident. The income gap between rural and urban area is becoming larger and larger.5) The wealth condition in rural area is different from one county to another. The income is relatively equality in four counties based on object absolute income groups, however, it is different based on the wealth index groups. Anyue county of Sichuan province is the poorest county in four counties, and Chi-ping county of Shandong province is the richest. That means the conception of purchasing the assets is different from different counties. The residents in Anyue county pay less on assets. The condition of household wealth is based on the possession of wealth assets, such as bike, color-TV, telephone, washing machine, mobile telephone, motor-bike, refrigerator, air-condition etc. Among ten kinds of assets, bike as vehicle, TV as amusement, telephone and mobile telephone as communication facility become the necessity of rural residents. 6) Medical treatment expenditure is one of rural residents' living burdens. We get the conclusion thereinafter by the statistical analysis. The mean scorce of self-reported health is 72.07, and the score rises while the income increases. The sickness rate of one month has the same trend under the different income measurements. The higher the income is, the lower the sickness rate is.While the income is still low, the income gap is becoming larger and larger. More researches should be taken to prove the feasibility of objective relative income in the rural area. The other three measurements indicate that the persons who are richer have the better health status and higher utilization rate of health services. Even though all of object absolute income, subject relative income and wealth index can be used as the measurement of income, the object absolute income can be used more directly in income measurement compared with others.