The Influence Of Medical Service Accessibility On Health Of The Elderly In China

With the acceleration of the aging population and the continuous improvement of life expectancy,the scale of the aging population are expanding,and the elderly’s demand for medical services gradually presents the characteristics of rigid growth,which raises higher requirements for the accessibility of the medical and health services.Also,the accessibility of medical services can reflect multiple aspects of the supply condition of medical and health services to some extent.Therefore,the accessibility of the elderly’s medical and health services has achieved more extensive attention and studying the influence of the accessibility of medical services on the elderly’s health has important implications.Through arranging and reviewing the related literature both home and abroad,based on Grossman’s Model of Demand for Healthcare and Health and Andersen Behavioral Model on Health Care Utilization,this paper adopts the cross-section data of 2018 which is recently released by the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey(CLHLS),and conducts a comprehensive investigation on the influence of the accessibility of medical services on the elderly’s health by selecting subjective and objective indexes that measure the accessibility of the elderly’s medical services as well as the elderly’s ADL,self-rated health and psychological health.Meanwhile,this paper adopts the OLS Regression model,Logistic Regression model and Ordered Probit Regression model to conduct empirical analysis and carries out heterogeneous regression analysis from both urban and rural perspectives,in order to further explore the different influences of the accessibility of the medical services on the elderly’s health under the dual economy structure of Chinese urban and rural areas.After data screening and missing value processing,8390 valid samples were finally obtained,of which the urban-rural ratio was about 7:3.The empirical results show that(1)The accessibilities of both subjective and objective medical services have a significant impact on the elderly’s ADL,self-rated health and psychological health,and also verifies the embarked influence of the accessibility index of subjective medical services on the elderly’s health to some extent,since subjective feelings can more truly reflect whether the medical service is accessible.(2)Among the accessibility indexes that measure objective medical services,in terms of the influence on the elderly’s ADL,the influence of per capita income,health education and the richness of medical resources have relatively prominent influence on the elderly’s ADL;in terms of the influence on the elderly’s self-rated health,hospital distance,medical insurance,family per capita income,health education and the richness of medical resources have a notable influence on the elderly’s self-rated health;in terms of the influence on the elderly’s psychological health,variations such as hospital distance,per capita income,etc.All have a dramatic impact on the psychological health.(3)The influence of the accessibility of medical services on the elderly’s health also features differences between urban and rural areas,which shows that the influence of medical services on health is larger in the elderly’s samples from rural areas of villages and towns.Based on the research conclusions,this paper puts forward the following suggestions:(1)Improve the space accessibility of the elderly’s medical services;(2)Improve the economic accessibility of the elderly’s medical services;(3)Encourage the elderly to conduct regular medical examinations;(4)Repair the deficiencies of healthy elderly care in rural areas of villages and towns.The innovations of this paper are as follows:(1)the subjective feeling index is added to measure the accessibility of medical services,so as to measure the accessibility of medical services more comprehensively.(2)Due to certain limitations of the external-database,the allocation of medical and health resources in each region cannot be reflected.For this reason,this paper introduces the data of China Health Statistics Yearbook in 2018 to calculate the number of doctors per thousand people in each province to measure the richness of medical resources,and also controls the regional effect of variables.The shortcomings of this paper are as follows:(1)the timeliness of data lags behind and time dynamic analysis is not carried out.(2)Certain deviations in the survey report may lead to partial deviations in the analysis results.