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Impact of Informal Care on Health Care Utilization Among Older People in China

Population aging has become a challenge to long-term care and health care for the society. Using China as a case study, this paper assesses allocative efficiency of resources in informal care and health care, to explore the effectiveness of the policy, i.e., encouraging informal care as a more cost-...

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Autor principal: Wang, Yixiao
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8679782/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igab046.1289
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author Wang, Yixiao
author_facet Wang, Yixiao
author_sort Wang, Yixiao
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description Population aging has become a challenge to long-term care and health care for the society. Using China as a case study, this paper assesses allocative efficiency of resources in informal care and health care, to explore the effectiveness of the policy, i.e., encouraging informal care as a more cost-effective way to reduce public health care spending. Drawing data from the 2011, 2014, and 2018 waves of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey, this study examines the impact of informal care on utilization of health care as well as amount of health care expenditures among older people with functional limitations in China. Using random effects model with instrumental variable approach, our findings suggest that informal care significantly reduces the utilization of health care, primarily by reducing the utilization of outpatient care. However, informal care significantly increases the amount of inpatient care expenditures for inpatient care users. We do not observe significant association between informal care and amount of outpatient care expenditures for outpatient care users. This study highlights a pressing need for the Chinese government to support informal caregivers by taking economic values of informal caregiving into consideration, and to improve efficiency in inpatient care by a more integrated resource allocation mechanism
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spelling pubmed-86797822021-12-17 Impact of Informal Care on Health Care Utilization Among Older People in China Wang, Yixiao Innov Aging Abstracts Population aging has become a challenge to long-term care and health care for the society. Using China as a case study, this paper assesses allocative efficiency of resources in informal care and health care, to explore the effectiveness of the policy, i.e., encouraging informal care as a more cost-effective way to reduce public health care spending. Drawing data from the 2011, 2014, and 2018 waves of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey, this study examines the impact of informal care on utilization of health care as well as amount of health care expenditures among older people with functional limitations in China. Using random effects model with instrumental variable approach, our findings suggest that informal care significantly reduces the utilization of health care, primarily by reducing the utilization of outpatient care. However, informal care significantly increases the amount of inpatient care expenditures for inpatient care users. We do not observe significant association between informal care and amount of outpatient care expenditures for outpatient care users. This study highlights a pressing need for the Chinese government to support informal caregivers by taking economic values of informal caregiving into consideration, and to improve efficiency in inpatient care by a more integrated resource allocation mechanism Oxford University Press 2021-12-17 /pmc/articles/PMC8679782/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igab046.1289 Text en © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) ), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Abstracts
Wang, Yixiao
Impact of Informal Care on Health Care Utilization Among Older People in China
title Impact of Informal Care on Health Care Utilization Among Older People in China
title_full Impact of Informal Care on Health Care Utilization Among Older People in China
title_fullStr Impact of Informal Care on Health Care Utilization Among Older People in China
title_full_unstemmed Impact of Informal Care on Health Care Utilization Among Older People in China
title_short Impact of Informal Care on Health Care Utilization Among Older People in China
title_sort impact of informal care on health care utilization among older people in china
topic Abstracts
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8679782/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igab046.1289
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