Review Article
Yang Yue, Li Shuman and Xiong
Abstract
Children and the elderly are vulnerable in body conditions and financial situations. They are special groups under the new rural cooperative medical insurance system. This article aimed at providing suggestions for policy making by analyzing hospitalization expenses and reimbursement of children and the elderly. The children concerned in this article are focused on the age of 14 years and under, while the elderly is for the age of 60 years and above. SAS software was used to analyze the hospitalization costs and reimbursements for these two populations using the datasets of one county in 2011. The results show that, the average hospitalization rate of children was 14.09%, while the highest was for children aged under 2 years due to some unnecessary hospitalization. The majority of hospitalization expenses of children were within 3000 Yuan. However, some hospitalization costs were still over 10000 Yuan. For the newborns, most hospitalization stays were within 14 days, and more than half of which were under 7 days. When they are growing up, newborns and children are getting stronger in physiques and resistances, and have lower rate in hospitalization. For the elderly inpatients, the average reimbursement rate for the hospitalization expenses was 55.52%. The minority of the aged people were hospitalized outside their residential area. This resulted in that the average hospitalization expenditure was 4.45 times the county level hospitalization, and 11 times the township level hospitalization. The article concluded that, the government needs to take actions to reduce unnecessary hospitalization percentage. More importantly, age-related diseases should be prevented effectively. Maternal and child’s protection needs to be strengthened urgently. The government should also encourage healthy lifestyles and prevent the senile diseases. After all, more attention should be given to children and newborns for their medical security.