Evaluation of long-term care insurance policy in Chinese pilot cities

Abstract

Since 2016, 15 pilot cities in China have implemented a long-term care insurance (LTCI) policy. The aim of this research was to explore the outcomes and evaluate the performance of the LTCI policy in the Chinese pilot cities and estimate the willingness of Chinese citizens to expand the formal implementation of LTCI policy in China. We gathered data from 1500 elderly people aged over 60 years in 15 pilot cities (100 surveys for each city) and the effective response rate was 77.8% (1167/1500). We relied on statistical analysis to elicit the outcomes and performance of LTCI implementation and an ordinal logit regression to analyze the factors associated with the extension of the LTCI policy. We examined factors associated with the perception according to sex, age, degree of disability, choices of care, living location, number of children, and monthly income. Among these factors, the relationship between living location and number of children of the family and the outcomes and performance of the LTCI policy in the pilot cities was significant. The rest of the factors showed no significance with the implementation of the LTCI in Chinese pilot cities. This study is among the first to explore the attitudes of Chinese citizens among those who have benefited from the LTCI policy in the pilot cities and contributes to identifying the outcomes of the LTCI in pilot cities to assist policymakers in their further implementation in China.