Poster Presentation Women's Health Forum 2021

Excess healthcare costs of depressive symptoms among women in late adolescence:  Evidence from national Medicare claims data (#48)

Danusha Jayawardana 1 2 , Brenda Gannon 1 3 , Jenny Doust 1 , Gita Mishra 1
  1. NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence on Women and Non-Communicable Diseases (CRE WaND), School of Public Health, University of Queensland, Herston, QUEENSLAND, Australia
  2. Centre for the Business and Economics of Health, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia
  3. Centre for the Business and Economics of Health and School of Economics, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia

Background: The prevalence of depression in late adolescence is increasing, yet there is limited empirical evidence on its economic consequences.

Objective:  We contribute to the literature by estimating the healthcare costs of depressive symptoms using data from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health and administrative data from Medicare Australia.

Methods: Our methodology is based on the two-part model of healthcare costs with individual fixed-effects. We further apply a variety of econometric techniques to address concerns of omitted variable bias, reverse causality, sample attrition bias and measurement error, allowing us to move closer to a causal interpretation of our findings.

Results: We find that young women with depressive symptoms (based on K10 score) have 15 percent higher annual healthcare costs (excluding hospital costs) than women with no depressive symptoms. The additional annual costs of having moderate and severe depressive symptoms among women aged 18 to 27 years is about $179 million (in 2019 AUD).  This represents 9.6% of the Australian government spending of $1,841 million on Medicare subsidised mental health specific services in 2018/19 (AIHW 2021). A large proportion of these costs is driven by the use of antidepressants and the services of psychiatrists and psychologists. The highest uptake of consultant psychiatrist items is among the women with severe depressive symptoms which is almost 50% of their total specialist attendances. Similarly, out of total allied health attendances, almost 84% are for psychologists. Further, the use of antidepressants is highest among women with severe depressive symptoms (37%) followed by women with moderate depressive symptoms (30%).  Additionally, we find that the effect of depressive symptoms on healthcare costs is highest during the first six months of onset, and gradually decreases afterwards.

Policy implications: The findings justify the importance of policy initiatives towards early prevention and treatment of depressive symptoms among young women.

  1. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2021), `Mental health services in Australia', https:// www.aihw.gov.au/reports/mental-health-services/mental-health-services-in-australia/ report-contents/expenditure-on-mental-health-related-services. Accessed: 2021-03-08.