Economic aspects of patterns of mental health care: cost variation by setting

The paper examines the evidence regarding the extent to which differences exist in health and mental health status of psychiatric patients treated in the specialty mental health, general medical, and informal care sectors. Differences in types of patients treated in the three sectors are important to identify since there are dramatic differences in the average costs of treatment. We use data from the Baltimore Epidemiological Catchment Area Survey to estimate a statistical model of treatment setting choice. Our results suggest that there is little support for attributing major differences in treatment costs across sectors to differences in the health and mental health status of patients.