삶의 만족도를 활용한 노인장기요양보험제도의 효과 검증: 성향점수매칭(PSM)을 중심으로

초록

The purpose of this study was to verify the effectiveness of the Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) system for the elderly, using life satisfaction as the outcome indicator. For this purpose, groups were divided according to the use of long-term care services, and Propensity Score Matching (PSM) was applied to ensure sample homogeneity between the user group and the non-user group. Furthermore, a t-test was conducted to compare the mean differences in life satisfaction between the groups based on the use of long-term care services. Matching was performed on 661 cases from the 2023 elderly survey data. In the matching process, demographic variables, economic variables, social-environmental variables, health-related variables, and depression were included as covariates. The analysis was conducted using SPSS 25.0 and the MatchIt package in R version 4.4.3. The results of the study are as follows. First, a significant difference was observed between the service user and non-user groups before matching, but no statistically significant difference remained after matching, confirming that the matching was appropriately performed. Second, the t-test conducted after matching showed that the life satisfaction of the service user group was significantly higher than that of the non-user group. These findings suggest that the use of long-term care services can improve the life satisfaction of the elderly, regardless of other influencing factors. Based on the research results, policy implications regarding the benefits of the LTCI system and future directions for its development are discussed.

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