Young women’s health expenditures are rising sharply due to psychiatric services

An evaluation by health insurer Santésuisse shows that their share of the total costs for young women has increased from 16 to 20 percentage points between 2017 and 2021.

Among young men, the share in 2021 was around 14 percent. On average, psychiatric care accounted for nearly six percent of total healthcare costs per person for all Swiss health insurers in the same year. The “Tagesanzeiger” had requested the evaluation from Santésuisse and was the first to report on it.

Over the period from 2017 to 2021, healthcare costs for young women rose on average by four percentage points per year, twice as fast as for the rest of the insured. For young men, costs increased by 1.7 percentage points per year. In general, the contribution to growth was significantly higher in adolescents than in the collective as a whole.

Psychiatric services were responsible for 44.4 percent of the increase in healthcare costs among young women between 2017 and 2021. For comparison: between 2011 and 2019 that was 24.4 percent.

“The fact that young people, especially young women, apparently have such a high number of mental health problems, makes us think,” Santésuisse said when asked by the Keystone-SDA news agency.

The health insurer had conducted research into the development of expenditure on psychiatric care in the compulsory basic insurance for young people aged 11 to 18 years. Only costs with a clear psychiatric background were taken into account. (oo/sda)