Chinese Air Pollution Leads To Higher Insurance Spending

What are the real effects of air pollution on communities?

It makes sense for us to ask this right now, because of several factors. One is that air pollution is increasing, and its sources are changing as well. We have massive smoke from wildfires moving around the country, and various kinds of chemical contamination on the rise as well.

Another reason is that air pollution tends to have some more subtle effects that we don’t always think about when we’re doing long-term thinking about issues like housing, investment and family planning.

For instance, there’s a new study that shows how air pollution can affect the rates of elective insurance coverage for residents in a given community.

The research is highly scientific, but it basically comes down to this – in China, researchers found that living in places with worse air quality led families to purchase more of certain available insurance products.

Comparing Communities

In trying to figure out whether air pollution was a cause of factor in insurance purchases, researchers looked at households on both sides of a demarcation line, given China’s Huai River policy, where residents above that line get certain kinds of free winter heating, and others on the other side of the line do not.

The scientific analysis cited something called a “regression discontinuity design,” which means basically that researchers are looking at that line, and seeing if there’s a jump in insurance purchasing when comparing and contrasting that household data.

There’s also a warning about something called “endogeneity,” which means that something inside the statistical system can throw off the results, and so scientists were looking for that.

In the end, the study indicates that people may purchase more insurance when they see more pollution in the air around them. There are some important lessons about human behavior here. It’s also a very real warning about our environment, and how it affects us.

What Kinds of Insurance?

The study doesn’t specify the exact kinds of insurance that people were buying. However, at some point, it does talk about life insurance being a key component. You might imagine that families living with dents or smoggy air might purchase more life insurance, either consciously or unconsciously counting air pollution as a factor in their longevity.

“We investigate micro level household insurance purchasing behavior and offer a deeper examination of air pollution’s impact on residents’ life and health commercial insurance demand,” researchers write. “This study systematically explores how air pollution influences commercial insurance demand through household risk perception and preventive expenditure channels.”

The report also contrasts family groups according to these other criteria: “financial literacy, social trust, medical resources accessibility, and family life cycle stages.”

So basically, families that are more financially and socially empowered will buy more insurance.

That’s not a surprise. Part of the surprising result in the study is that the air pollution will make a measurable difference in insurance spending.

What it shows is that air pollution has a real effect on people, on families, on neighborhoods, and on communities. It’s not always visible, although in many of the worst cases, it is. Either way, it’s something to be aware of. And when it gets bad, people talk about it.

Invisible Pollution

Whether you see air pollution happening around you, there’s a good chance that you or someone in your family ends up with some condition which air pollution can cause or exacerbate. Some of the most common ones include:

You may notice things like itchiness around the eyes, or wheezing, or feeling like it’s more difficult to draw a breath. Your pulmonary system is a complex thing. There’s the process of air intake, where your alveoli process the air, and the distribution of chemical components through the body. All of this works best when the air around you is clean and relatively free from pathogens or other contaminants.

Changing the Air

You can advocate for better outdoor air in your part of the world, but you can also use available technology to clean the air inside of your home, and benefit from more breathable air where you live.

Think about what’s most effective – trying to control the outdoor environment, or putting safeguards in place in a controlled space?

With the right power and features, an air purifier can be a very important part of protecting your health and the health of your family.

Let US Air Purifiers LLC help you to investigate what would be best for your space including metrics like ACH or air changes per hour, and CADR rate. We can help answer any questions about features, metrics, and new technology. These machines are always getting better at protecting human health in an era where we have concerns about what’s in our air. Get more confidence in the quality of life that you can expect in your home.