ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Health Economics
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1498105
Effects of Long-Term Care Insurance on Health: A Study of the Middle-aged and Elderly in Pilot Cities in China
Provisionally accepted
- 1Yunnan University, Kunming, China
- 2Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Region, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
China established a trial long-term care insurance program in 15 cities in 2016 to address the country's aging population; however, the policy's impacts must be confirmed. The study examines the effect of long-term care insurance on the health status of citizens in the innovative pilot cities using panel data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) for four periods: 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2018. A difference-in-difference model is used to analyze the data. When compared to residents surveyed in other cities where the policy was not implemented, the data demonstrate that the implementation of long-term care insurance in the pilot cities led to a significant rise in self-rated health of 0.093 levels for the surveyed residents. The variables educational attainment, household registration, marital status variable and regional number of hospitals were significant. Furthermore, compared to the eastern pilot cities, the central and western pilot cities' citizens' health condition improved considerably. Therefore, the long-term care insurance policy has a significant policy promotion effect on the health status of residents.
Keywords: Long-term care insurance (LTCI), long-term care (LTC), Policy evaluation, Difference-in-difference model, Health performance
Received: 27 Sep 2024; Accepted: 23 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Chen, Ma and Lyu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Qian Chen, Yunnan University, Kunming, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.