Background
A large number of internal immigrants in the process of urbanization in China is Migrant Parents, the aging group who move to urban area involuntarily to support their family. They are more vulnerable economically and physically than the younger migrants. However, the fragmentation of rural and urban health insurance schemes divided by “hukou” household registration system limit migrant’s access to healthcare services in their resident location. Some provinces have started to consolidate the Urban Resident Basic Medical Insurance and the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme as one Integrated Medical Insurance Schemes (IMIS) to reduce the disparity between different schemes and increate the health care utilization of migrants.
Methods
Using China Migrants Dynamic Survey, we used OLS for regression in models.
Results
We found that the migrant parents who are covered by the IMIS are more likely to choose inpatient service and to seek medical treatment in the migrant destination, by improving the convenience of medical expense reimbursement and relieving the economic pressure.
Discussion
The potential mechanisms of our results could be that IMIS alleviates the difficulty of seeking medical care in migrant destination by improving the convenience of medical expense reimbursement and relieving the economic constrain.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.