NCJ Number
190734
Date Published
February 2001
Length
100 pages
Annotation
This document outlines a report based on a larger study of mental health and substance abuse (MH/SA) treatment expenditures designed to provide periodic expenditure estimates.
Abstract
The social cost of substance abuse in the United States in 1995 was estimated at $276 billion. Given the magnitude, morbidity, and mortality and this enormous cost, society should know how much is being invested in SA treatment. Major changes over the last 10 years in the organization and financing of health care make the tracking over time of the investment in substance treatment important. Because SA alone was an important social problem and a difficult health care challenge, the following questions were asked: how much was spent to treat alcohol and/or drug abuse disorders; how were the expenditures distributed by payer and provider type; how had spending changed from 1987 to 1997; and how did SA expenditures compare to those for mental health and all health care in the United States. The project estimated expenditures using data and methods that the Health Care Financing Administration used for estimates of national health expenditures from the National Health Accounts (NHA). Like the NHA, this work primarily used nationally representative databases with multiple years of data, which generally covered the study period of 1987 to 1997. A key finding was that the total expenditure for treatment of SA was $11.9 billion in 1997. SA treatment expenditures, when defined comparably to the NHA, grew at half the rate of all health care. The slower growth of SA expenditures relative to all health care was due primarily to less spending on hospital care (primarily for alcohol treatment). Faster spending on other services such as outpatient and residential treatment offset the decline in hospital-based spending on SA. Spending on SA between 1987 and 1997 shifted from private to public support. 35 figures, 28 tables, 5 appendices, references and glossary