Substance Abuse Treatment Outcomes: A Comparison of Medicaid- and Non-Medicaid-Funded Adolescents

ABSTRACT

The state of Missouri provides detoxification, residential and outpatient services to substance abusing adolescents through its Comprehensive Substance Abuse Treatment and Rehabilitation (CSTAR) program. This analysis compares Medicaid-funded and non-Medicaid-funded youth in CSTAR at treatment admission, during treatment, and at treatment discharge. Medicaid-funded youth demonstrated a higher risk at pretreatment for substance use and delinquency. Consistent with this higher risk status, they remained in treatment longer and had higher service costs. Both groups demonstrated similar treatment completion rates and abstinence levels at discharge. The findings suggest that longer treatment for the Medicaid group mitigated issues relating to poverty, criminal behavior, and family cohesiveness.

KEYWORDS:

• Medicaid
• substance abuse treatment
• services cost
• adolescence
• predicting abstinence
• complexity

This article was partially supported by SAMHSA Contract: 270007078 awarded to Caliber Associates. The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of Andrew Homer, PhD, and Christie Lundy, PhD, of the Missouri Department of Mental Health and Drug Abuse Administration (DMHADA) to the preparation of this article.