The Statistical And Measurement Research On The Unmet Health Demand Among China’s Urban Residents

The basic purpose of social and economic development is to improve the quality of life,and human health closely affects residential living standards.Residents tend to maintain their health,which drives the demand for medical services.Generally,residents deserve the same quantity and quality of medical-care services related to the same health issues,which continue unaltered by individual income levels and different locations.The unmet health demand resulted in medical care utilization inequality,health inequality,and volatile social conditions.The existing health management system and medical and health system cannot meet all the demand for health in the region,and the unmet health demand destroys the fairness of health services.In the Sixth Survey of National Health Services of China,about 9% of urban hospitalized residents did not choose to be in hospitals because of financial difficulty,and 33.8% of people >65 years did not receive a conventional health check-up in 2017.Moreover,China’s fast urbanization showed that more people moved to urban areas,which created huge pressure on the medical-care system.Therefore,society should change the way it mobilizes health resources and improve resources utilization efficiency at the national level.One of the key issues is identifying the unmet demand for health,which is our main goal here.Our study contributes to the literature along three dimensions.We first discussed the health demand function of Grossman and developed a stochastic frontier function for the gross demand of residents’ medical services.Second,we calculated unmet demand by the relative distance between the actual demand and the optimal demand for medical services.Third,we distinguished unmet demand from cross-sectional heterogeneity by parameterizing the mean value of the inefficient term of the stochastic frontier function,which produced a more accurate estimate of unmet health demand.Moreover,based on the measurement and calculation of the unmet health demand among China’s urban residents,we tested the convergence hypothesis of the provincial unmet health demand.From the regional perspective,our study viewed that resident demanded the optimal amount of health in the competitive market,and built a reasonable approach to measuring the unmet health demand at the regional level,which could evaluate the allocation efficiency of the regional medical system and provide meaningful policy implications.Based on the theoretical model,our work estimated unmet health demand among China’s urban residents by using provincial dataset that covered 2005–2020.The empirical results indicate that: First,unmet health demand was 19.38% for China in 2020,implying that about 19.38% of residents’ health demand was unsatisfied.Then,our results indicated that medical prices and public medical care positively affected unmet health demand.Education,aging,and medical insurance produced a negative and significant effect on unmet health demand,a 1% increase in education increased unmet health demand by 6.474%.Meanwhile,medical prices mainly affected unmet health demand,and the region with low medical prices had less unmet demands than regions with high and moderate medical prices during 2005–2020.Conditional β convergence and unconditional β convergence exist in the unmet health demand growth of the whole country.Based on the above conclusions,this paper puts forward the following policy recommendations:(1)Pay attention to the health education of residents,and restrain the impact of information asymmetry on the unmet health demand among residents.(2)Speed up the improvement of the existing medical insurance system to effectively reduce the problem of excessive medical treatment.(3)Strengthen the construction of grass-roots services and improve the service capacity of hierarchical diagnosis and treatment.(4)Formulate different development strategies according to the actual situation of each region.