Abstract:

After nearly a decade of institutional evolution, China's Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) is undergoing a critical transition from local pilot programs to national legislation. In this process, disabled individuals with functional impairments, as a special insured group under LTCI, possess dual attributes of "disability" and "functional impairment," which objectively fosters institutional interaction between the LTCI system and the disability care system. A key current policy challenge is how to coordinate these two systems to adequately meet the care needs of disabled individuals with functional impairments while avoiding resource waste due to overlapping benefits. Based on this, it is necessary to first clarify the specific forms of this institutional interaction and then construct a systematic pathway for synergistic integration. The interaction can be categorized into two types based on the degree of overlap: first, convergence in protection functions, and second, duplication in benefit provisions. Regarding synergistic integration, for the former, the focus should be on clarifying institutional boundaries and ensuring tiered articulation of protections-that is, LTCI should maintain functional distinctions from other social insurance programs while complementing social assistance systems. For the latter, phased integration and long-term coordination mechanisms should be adopted: in the short term, implementing selective provision of care services and categorized consolidation of subsidies could be pursued, with the long-term goal of promoting unified provision of care services and establishing linkage mechanisms between subsidies and premium contributions.

Key words: long-term care insurance, disability care, functional impairment, residential care services, care subsidies