Does Sharing Costs with Patients Improve Mental Health Care?

Many models of healthcare financing require increased cost sharing through higher deductibles and copayments in attempts to control unnecessary use of mental health services by the “worried well.” Dutch data on 1.4 million mental health specialist treatment records for adults, opened from 2010 to 2012, illustrate the pitfalls of this approach.

Researchers compared costs and utilization for the final year of the old universal insurance system and the first year of a new system, which increased adults' out-of-pocket costs for mental health care to ≤US$226/year for outpatient treatment and US$169/month for inpatient treatment (in addition to other healthcare deductibles).

In the old system, new outpatient treatment episodes increased about 4% to…