School of Economics and Management, Jilin Agricultural University, Changchun, China.
School of Business, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China.
Front Public Health. 2022 Feb 7;10:848539. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.848539. eCollection 2022.
The New Rural Cooperative Medical System (NRCMS) is one of the essential systems for ensuring public health in rural China. This paper investigates the effect of farmers' participation in the NRCMS on their subjective well-being and its mechanisms using data from the Chinese General Social Survey 2017. The results show that farmers' participation in the NRCMS significantly enhances their subjective well-being, and these results remain robust after regression with the instrumental variables method and propensity score matching method. Further analysis of the mechanisms suggests that participation in the NRCMS can enhance farmers' subjective well-being by increasing their consumption levels other than medical consumption. Moreover, medical consumption levels play a negative role in participating in the NRCMS on farmers' subjective well-being, which can be explained as the "masking effect." The regression results of the subsamples show that the higher a farmer's income is, the less his or her participation in the NRCMS enhances subjective well-being. And the effect of participation in the NRCMS on farmers' subjective well-being is not significant if their health status is too high or too low.
新型农村合作医疗制度（NRCMS）是保障中国农村公共卫生的重要制度之一。本文利用中国综合社会调查 2017 年的数据，考察了农民参与 NRCMS 对其主观幸福感的影响及其机制。结果表明，农民参与 NRCMS 显著提高了其主观幸福感，并且这些结果在使用工具变量法和倾向得分匹配法进行回归后仍然稳健。进一步的机制分析表明，参与 NRCMS 可以通过提高农民的消费水平（而不仅仅是医疗消费水平）来提高他们的主观幸福感。此外，医疗消费水平对农民主观幸福感的影响呈负向，这可以解释为“掩盖效应”。子样本的回归结果表明，农民的收入越高，参与 NRCMS 对其主观幸福感的提升作用越小。而且，如果农民的健康状况过高或过低，参与 NRCMS 对其主观幸福感的影响并不显著。
