A Study On The Influence Factors Of China's Health Inequality

Health is the basis for human survival and the internal impetus for country development.Equity and justice are important goals in health field.However,from global sight of view,health inequalities exist inside of most countries,which means the rich enjoy a better health condition while the poor are in a worse condition.The deterioration of health inequality will lead the underclass into a vicious cycle of"disease-poverty" and increase the social burden,which is harmful to a country's long-term and stable development.Since China's reform and opening-up,China has experienced an economical speed-up.With the growth of wealth gap,China is faced with sharp contradictions over health inequalities.In such a background,to do a research on the formation mechanism of health inequality and identify the influencing factors is extremely urgent for bringing down the health inequality in China.In this dissertation,health inequality was measured by concentration index.Using the data from Chinese General Social Survey,the extent of China's health inequality during 2005-2013 were calculated.Based on the Grossman's health demand theory,health production function was built.Combining the static and dynamic decomposition method of Wagstaff(2003),the dissertation discussed the social-economic factors which were affecting the health inequality in China.The dissertation found that,there were significant differences in the level of health among different social status and regions in China.People who were in high social rank with high income and high-level education were in better health condition than those in low social rank.Also,residents in east China enjoyed the greatest health conditions and the midland took the second place while the west China were in the poorest.Further research showed that,there existed health inequality in both rural and urban China.This inequality had a growing trend.Compared to other determinants of health,income factor contributed the most to the health inequalities in rural China.For rural areas,expansion in health inequality was mainly due to the widening income gap,or the income inequality.For urban side,the impact of education factor on the health inequality in urban China merited more attention.In recent years,the proportion of urban residents with higher-education increased greatly.Income among people with different education background was allocated more unequally at the same time.Simply put,higher educated residents earned more while the lower educated earned less.Education factor contributed a lot to the growth of health inequality in urban China.China was experiencing a process of people aging.No matter in cities or in the rural sites,the income gap between the elderly people and the non-elderly was widening.This kind of widening gap also caused the growth of health inequalities.To be concluded,the variation of social economic factors like income,education and age structure were important causes of the increase of health inequalities in China.The goal of reducing health inequalities in China could be achieved through a series of measures,including narrowing income disparities,promoting the equity of education and increasing pension insurance coverage and the quality of medical service.