Expanded mental health benefits and outpatient depression treatment intensity

Background: The justification for higher cost-sharing for behavioral health treatment is its greater price sensitivity relative to general healthcare treatment. Despite this, recent policy efforts have focused on improving access to behavioral health treatment. Objectives: We measured the effects on outpatient treatment of depression of a change in mental health benefits for employees of a large U.S.-based corporation. Research Design: The benefit change involved 3 major elements: reduced copayments for mental health treatment, the implementation of a selective contracting network, and an effort to destigmatize mental illness. Claims data and a difference-in-differences methodology were used to examine how the benefit change affected outpatient treatment of depression. Subjects: Subjects consisted of 214,517 employee-years of data for individuals who were continuously enrolled for at least 1 full year at the intervention company and 96,365 employee-years in the control group. Measures: We measured initiation into treatment of depression and the number of outpatient therapy visits. Results: The benefit change was associated with a 26% increase in the probability of initiating depression treatment. Conditional on initiating treatment, patients in the intervention company received 1.2 additional (P < 0.001) outpatient mental health treatment visits relative to the control group. Conclusions: Our results suggest that the overall effect of the company's benefit change was to significantly increase the number of outpatient visits per episode of treatment conditional on treatment initiation.