The results reveal that pension enrollment and income from the NRPS both have had a beneficial impact on objective measures of physical health, cognitive function, and psychological well-being of the rural elderly, and also reduced mortality over a three-year horizon by 6 percentage points. Evidence further suggests that pension recipients respond to the new pension income in multiple ways: improved nutrition intake, better accessibility to health care, increased informal care, increased leisure activities, and better self-perceived relative economic situation. These in turn act as channels from pension income to health of the Chinese rural elderly.