Research On The Old-age Life Security System In China

In the past five or six years more and more scholars began to focus on the old-age life security system.People are interested in the perfection of it especially the integration of the different systems in urban and rural areas.China is now experiencing rapid ageing process and the number of old people is huge.But unfortunately the old-age life security system in China,including the income security policies,the medical insurance system,the caring service system,etc.,is far from meeting the demands,and among all the problems the most remarkable one is the huge gap between the rural and urban areas.More and more people began to focus on this problem in recent years.Wuxi is a prefecture-level city of Jiangsu province,one of China’s most affluent provinces.Wuxi is a relatively developed city.Being one of the earliest cities entering the aged stage,the CPC party committee and municipal government of Wuxi began to strengthen the old-age life security system decades ago.In this dissertation I arrange the policies and practices about old-age life security system in Wuxi and find out the advantages and disadvantages.By analyzing the policies and practices of Wuxi city I give advices on improving the national policies in China.The old-age life security system consists mainly of the income security system,the medical insurance system and the caring service system.The income security policies can increase the income or reduce the expenses,so broadly speaking the medical policies can also contribute to the income security of the eldly.Of course it is more than that.The old-age income security system consists of many policies such as the social pension insurance,non-contributory pension,commercial pension insurance,old-age allowance and so on.The five pillar model designed by the World Bank has been playing an important role in promoting the construction of old-age income system in many countries.The social pension system in Wuxi is relatively perfect.The social pension policies of urban and rural areas have been integrated.But the security level of new policy is very limited.Furthermore,there are still huge gaps between social pension policies for enterprise retirees,governmental authority retirees and non-worker residents.There are few income sources for the eldly,especially the old farmers.The most aspects of old-age medical insurance system are the scope,the ratio of reimbursement and the accessibility of medical resources.Wuxi is in conformity with the other cities of China on main medical policies,but it has gone further on the integration of policies between rural and urban areas.Wuxi has established the integrated urban-rural medical system three years ago,but there are still many problems about it,especially the accessibility difficulties and high costs.The current medical system is not suitable with the rapid ageing process in our society.For the eldly,community health care system is of special importance because most of the eldly suffer from chronic illness.Since they are familiar with their health condition,the old people don’t need to go to big hospital.The perfection of community health care system is useful to the integration of rural and urban health care systems,because for the old people living in rural areas the community hospital located in villages and towns and the clinics in their own villages are more convenient than big hospitals.The old-age caring service system consists of life caring service,spiritual consolation,medical care especially the long-term care,emergent rescue,preferential treatment,etc.the old-age caring service system in Wuxi has been maturing in recent years.The old-age care institutions in Wuxi are in the lead in both quantity and quality,and more institutions are being constructed.Many communities have established infrastructure and institution related to old-age caring.Furthermore,Wuxi has obtained outstanding achievements in meeting the needs of the eldly on spiritual life and emergent rescue and so on.But the rural residents benefits far less than the urban eldly.In order to integrate the urban-rural old-age life security system,Wuxi should work simultaneously on income security,medical security and caring service.In the past years Wuxi has obtained outstanding achievements on urban-rural integration in social pension and medical insurance,which laid a good grounding for further innovation.In order to integrate the urban-rural old-age life security system Wuxi should make innovations in administrative institutions and mechanisms.The government should assume lead responsibilities but it should not manage everything.The roles of other agents should also be recognized.Wuxi has successfully repositioned its functions through government procurement in public services including old-age life security.As for the mechanisms,the integration of social pension and health care system should be further improved.Taking into account of the great gap between policies and services of rural and urban eldly,the government should focus on these problems to make better the integration of urban-rural old-age life security system.