Socioeconomic disparities in health within and across low- and middle-income countries pose a significant global public health concern. While prior research has demonstrated the importance of socioeconomic status on health outcomes, few studies have employed comprehensive measures of individual-level health such as quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) in exploring the quantitative relationship. In our study, we employed QALYs to measure individual-level health, using health-related quality of life scores based on the Short Form 36 and predicted remaining life years through individual-specific Weibull survival analysis. We then constructed a linear regression model to explore the socioeconomic factors that influence QALYs, providing a predictive model of individual-level QALYs throughout remaining lifetimes. This practical tool can help individuals predict their remaining healthy life years. Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study between 2011 and 2018, we found that education and occupation were the primary factors influencing health outcomes among individuals aged 45 and above, while income appeared to have less of an impact when education and occupation were simultaneously controlled for. To promote the health status of this population, low- and middle-income countries should prioritize the long-term advancement of their population’s education while controlling unemployment rates in the short term.

Background In recent years, the Chinese government has been trying to improve informal-sector workers’ and farmers’ access to healthcare and reduce their financial burdens by introducing a plan of cost-sharing reduction, but the effect on outpatient care utilization remains unknown. Furthermore, scarce evidence has been provided to help understand the impact of cost-sharing reduction on healthcare use in low- and middle-income countries. The policy change of the coinsurance reduction for outpatient care from 75 to 55% for the enrollees of the Urban and Rural Residents Basic Medical Insurance in Taizhou, China in 2015 provides us a good quasi-experimental setting to explore such an impact. Methods We do a quasi-experimental study to explore the impact of coinsurance reduction on outpatient care use among the informal-sector workers and farmers aged 45 and above by estimating a fixed-effects negative binomial model with the difference-in-differences approach and the matching method. Heterogeneous effects in primary care clinics and for the older people aged 60 and above are also examined. Our data is from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study 2013 and 2015. Results We find neither statistically significant impact of coinsurance reduction on outpatient care utilization in all health facilities for informal-sector workers and farmers aged 45 and above, nor heterogeneous effects in primary care clinics and for older people aged 60 and above. Conclusions We conclude that the coinsurance reduction cannot effectively improve the informal-sector workers’ and farmers’ utilization of healthcare if the cost-sharing undertaken by patients remains high even after the reduction. Besides, improving healthcare quality in primary care clinics may play a more important role than merely introducing a cost-sharing reduction plan in enhancing the role of primary care clinics as gatekeepers. We propose that only a substantial coinsurance reduction may help influence the utilization of healthcare for informal-sector workers and farmers, and enhancing the healthcare quality in primary care clinics should be given priority in low- and middle-income countries.