Samuel H Zuvekas

..Straightforward adjustments to the MEPS expenditure estimates could align them with aggregate sources, such as the National Health Expenditure Accounts, while preserving underlying relationships between expenditures and key correlates...

..Other policy measures, designed to expand and improve health insurance coverage or reduce racial/ethnic disparities, could have a more profound impact...

..The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) is a widely used nationally representative survey of health care use and expenditures. Numerous studies raise concerns that use is underreported in household surveys...

..Given this history, markets that now lack infrastructure to handle physician risk sharing will probably be challenged by current proposals for payment reform, many of which incorporate components of capitation...

..In addition, mental health service use is lower among members of minority communities, compared with non-Hispanic whites...

..We build on this previous research by incorporating additional factors such as attitudes about health care and neighborhood characteristics, as well as separately analyzing different Hispanic subgroups...

..Capitation by itself may increase access to consumers' usual sources of care, improve primary preventive care, and reduce coordination, but estimates with GMM were not statistically significant...

..We present several examples of the application of this method that illustrate the importance of the adjustments for analyses of trends in health care spending...

..The authors examined the utilization of stimulant medications for the treatment of ADHD in U.S. children during the period 1996–2008 to determine trends by age, sex, race/ethnicity, family income, and geographic region...

..Using multivariate panel data methods, we now suggest that secular trends were largely responsible for this increase...

..However, the rapid rise of managed behavioral health care organizations (MBHOs) may have effectively offset these gains in nominal coverage...

..Behavioral analyses of the determinants of medication use and expenditures were largely unaffected because underreporting cut across most sociodemographic groups...

..Much of existing disparities remains unexplained, presenting a challenge to developing policies to eliminate them...

..Most of the burden was due to other medical conditions and lower average incomes among families with mental health problems...

..We discuss the potential implications for current cost containment and reform efforts...

..The study examined whether a managed behavioral health care organization (MBHO) shifted treatment costs...

..The effect of the parity mandate on access was ambiguous: While treatment prevalence rose nearly 50 percent, similar increases were observed for groups not subject to the mandate...

..However, we find evidence that the MBHO may have restrained growth in prescription medication spending...

..Prescription drug spending increased at a real rate of almost 20 percent a year. About one-third of this increase came from more MH/SA medication users and two-thirds from higher costs per user...

..Thus, behavioral analyses are largely unaffected by misreporting...

..3%) and 1996 (1.0%). The aim of this study was to determine whether pediatric use of antidepressants continued to rise at a national level during the period 1997-2002...

..A large body of research shows that global self-rated health is related to important outcome variables. Increasingly, studies also obtain a single global self-rating of mental health, but understanding of what this item measures is limited...