Analysis of Long-term Care Insurance Demand of Megalopolis in China under the Background of Aging of Population—Take Shanghai as an Example†

Abstract

The development of Long-term Care Insurance (LTCI), which matches that people get old before becoming rich lag behind. The mega-urban agglomeration formed in the metropolitan area under the process of urbanization intensifies the demand for insurance driven by long-term care needs. This paper constructs a theoretical model to sort out the micro-action mechanism of LTCI products entering the production field through the consumption of corporate security services, and at the same time entering the consumption field in the form of security services demand from families, individuals and government agencies, it reveals that the differences in the micro-paths of LTCI products entering the enterprise production field and the household consumption field under different regional economic and social conditions. Then, using the GM (1,1) model to analyze the demand for LTCI under the aging population trend of Shanghai, a super large city in China, we found that the situation and characteristics of Shanghai and Japan are similar, and the number of people who need care under the distribution of the elderly population in Shanghai from 2017 to 2027 is much lower than the number of people who need LTCI. Meanwhile, the current long-term nursing service has a large labor gap and high professional skills requirements, but the current salary is low. Besides, the share of elderly care institutions is small, which is not enough to support the current occupancy needs of severely disabled people. The actual development has a greater potential impact on public health expenditures, especially the increase in public health expenditures after the outbreak of the COVID-19 has brought uncertainty. Based on the above findings, we propose to introduce the successful mode of American political and commercial cooperation and the Japanese social security model to alleviate the rapid growth in the demand for LTCI accompanied by the aging trend in the mega-urban clusters formed in the urbanization process.