Dynamics of Life Satisfaction Among Rural Elderly in China: The Role of Health Insurance Policies and Intergenerational Relationships

Abstract

The pursuit of achieving Goal 3 of the 2030 United Nations agenda for Sustainable Development, "ensuring healthy lives, achieving universal health coverage and promoting wellbeing for all", has been a cardinal concern of governments and policy makers. The rural-urban divide in China has resulted in equality of health care distribution. To address this anomaly, the government of China has put in place the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS). This intervention aims at ensuring the equitable distribution and affordability of health care in rural areas. Despite this measure, certain drawbacks in its implementation affect overall life satisfaction. Rural-urban migration resulting in age distribution gaps has also been generally identified by a plethora of literature to hamper intergenerational interaction, which is essential to overall life satisfaction especially for the elderly. However, little is known about the extent to which the NCMS, coupled with its drawbacks and intergenerational interaction, affect the overall life satisfaction of the rural elderly in China.Using an ordered response model, this study presents a thorough analysis on the life satisfaction of rural elderly making comparison across age groups and residence status sub-samples using a panel data from the two waves, 2011 and 2013, from China's Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey. The empirical results indicate that though the NCMS is indeed beneficial to promoting health and overall life satisfaction of rural elderly, there are some attendant limitations. We also find that intergenerational interaction in the form of frequent communication and financial assistance from children who fall within the non-cohabiting category promotes life satisfaction of the rural elderly. The degree of importance however varies across the aforementioned groups.

Old Age Support in Urban China: The Role of Pension Schemes, Self-Support Ability and Intergenerational Assistance

“…With respect to intergenerational support, having at least one child has a statistically significant positive effect on the life satisfaction of retired urban elderly in China. This supports existing research where having a child promotes life satisfaction [62]. On the hand, cohabiting with children during retirement is detrimental to life satisfaction, though this correlational effect is not statistically significant.…”

“…One reason could be that most retired urban elderly would like to be independent of their children when it comes to financial assistance, as they are able to support themselves and benefit from the public pension scheme. This finding is very different from rural China, where financial support from non-cohabiting children enhances life satisfaction [62]. This finding could be an indication that self-support ability through personal finance and wealth management has become prevalent in urban China as a result of retired urban elderly not wanting to be financially dependent on their children.…”

Do people's perceptions and attitudes associate with enrollment in health insurance in a context of Nepal?

“…It is challenging to implement since a mass population is still unaware of it. Therefore, positive attitude and perception are prerequisites for the success of the program (Yin et al, 2019).…”

The Development of a Coding Scheme for Intergenerational Learning and Its Application to the Patterns of Intergenerational Collaborative Communication

“…There has been accumulating attention paid and efforts made to investigate the advantages of having older and younger generations learn together across different countries (e.g., Boström, 2014 ; Franz and Scheunpflug, 2016 ; Spiteri, 2016 ; Gerpott et al, 2017 ; McKee and Scheffel, 2019 ; Sun et al, 2019 ; Yin et al, 2019 ; Santini et al, 2020 ). For example, Santini et al ( 2020 ) conducted an intergenerational learning program in Germany, Italy, and Slovenia focusing on the field of organization and employment.…”

“…Previous research on observing interaction among individuals mainly focused on couples and family members (e.g., Gottman and Driver, 2005 ; Darling et al, 2008 ; Friedlander et al, 2019 ). Studies on intergenerational partners and their interaction processes have, however, been accumulating because of the growing need for social structure (McKee and Scheffel, 2019 ; Sun et al, 2019 ; Yin et al, 2019 ).…”