Cost Sharing and the Demand for Ambulatory Mental Health Services: A Comment on the Rand Health Insurance Study

Asserts that the results obtained by W. G. Manning et al are premature and should not be interpreted as estimates of the effects of co-insurance on the use of mental health care because the mean dollar expenditure (MDE), an important feature of insurance plans in the Rand Corporation's Health Insurance Study (HIS), was never analyzed. It is argued that the otherwise anomalous pattern of ambulatory mental health expenditures in the HIS can be explained by the MDE effect. (October 1984)