Abstract

Peasant workers are a vulnerable population with low income and bad health situations in urban China. They have been left out of the urban schemes of health insurance, because they do not hold legal urban residency. Many of them cannot afford health care because of financial difficulty. To solve this problem, the Central Government of China has recently instructed that the urban schemes of health insurance should open the door to peasant workers. However, as the original targeted population of urban schemes is a group with higher income than peasant workers, it is questioned whether urban schemes could reduce the financial risk for peasant workers as they do for legal urban residents. To answer this question, the study used factorial ANOVA to check if the effect of urban schemes on reducing financial risk was the same for both peasant workers and legal urban residents. Before that, the disparity on urban schemes’ coverage and income between the two groups was examined and found statistically significant. The results also showed that the effect of urban schemes on reducing financial risk was not statistically significant for peasant workers. Therefore, the solution from the Central Government of China might not be helpful for peasant workers.