Research On Income-related Health Inequality And Its Decomposition In China’s Elderly People

Since the time we entry into the 21 st century,with the rapid development of our economy at an average annual growth rate of over 8%,the rankings of indicators that reflect the health status have rapidly risen to the forefront among developing countries.However,The improvement of the health status of average residents can not obscure the fact that health inequality exists.The problem of health inequality has gradually become an urgent social problem to be solved.First of all,On the basis of summarizing the existing literature,we regress on the factors that affect the health with ordered Probit model,the results show that:Income has the most positive impact on health;the male population has healthier body than the female;the health level gradually declines with age;the health level of seniors in urban areas is generally higher than that in the rural areas;the health level of the eastern region is higher than that of the western region The highly educated elders have more health advantages than the elder-educated elders.Second,the paper makes a static and dynamic measurement and decomposition of health inequality respectively.On the one hand,we use the concentration index method and Theil index method to measure the degree of health inequality in urban and rural areas of our country separately.And then we decompose the indices to study the contribute rate of each influencing factor to the health inequality and the health inequality within the group and inequality between groups.On the other hand,we subtract the two-year Erreygers index.The results were decomposed into income growth effect,income distribution effect,income flow effect and crowd aging effect.The results show that there is indeed an inequality in the health of the rich and the poor in the seniors;The health inequality in urban areas is higher than that in rural areas;Income and income inequality are the main causes of health inequalities;The average health level shows an upward trend with the income group from low to high,the status of health inequality in the lower income group is more urgent than that of the high income group;the health inequalities in the group are significantly higher than the health inequalities among the groups;In the process of mitigating the level of health inequality,the effects of income growth effects,income distribution effects,and income flow effects are quite equal;The health inequalities of older men are generally higher than women.Finally,this article concludes the conclusion drawn from the full text,and put forward the policy recommendations from five angles like accelerating theimprovement of the income growth mechanism for the elderly,improve the pension security system,promote the diversification of the old-age care model,increase investment in education for the elderly,popularize health care knowledge,improve the medical security system,and deepen the reform of the medical and health system,actively promote the development of the central and western regions and the“Belt and Road”national strategy to narrow the regional differences.