The burden in other regions of the United States ranged between 8 and 10 percent, with 10 percent of mental health treatment and substance abuse treatment users nationwide spending more than 5 percent of their family's annual income. Such spending includes patient out-of-pocket costs for psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and other specialty providers as well as mental health treatment provided by primary care physicians and the out-of-pocket costs of psychotropic medications.

People living in the U.S. South paid the highest percentage of treatment costs out of their own pockets because they were the most likely to use prescription medications for their treatment and they paid the greatest share (39 percent) of the costs of these medications.

AHRQ economist Samuel Zuvekas, Ph.D., and Chad Meyerhoefer, Ph.D., a professor of economics with Lehigh University, also looked at differences in the out-of-pocket payment burden across states. They found modest, but important, variation between states. For example, 20 percent fewer people used mental health treatment in Illinois than in Ohio, but people with mental health treatment in Illinois paid almost twice as much out of pocket.

The researchers also found that prescription medications accounted for almost two-thirds of out-of-pocket spending on outpatient mental health treatment. The out-of-pocket costs of medications are generally beyond the scope of recently enacted federal parity laws, which will require equal coverage for mental health in most private health plans and Medicare, limiting the extent to which parity laws will reduce the financial burden of mental health treatment to families.

Source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Comments

Add New Search RSS

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Title:
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.26

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."