Medicaid Managed Care and the Distribution of Societal Costs for Persons With Severe Mental Illness

Understanding the distribution of societal costs is essential in evaluating health care financing strategies. For adults with mental illnesses, efforts to manage Medicaid expenditures may result in substituting individual and family resources for Medicaid services. Government must focus on the distribution of societal costs since risk-based financing strategies may redistribute costs across the fragmented human services sector and result in unintended system inefficiencies.