5 / 42
5
The results show that CBT improved health and prevented sick leave for
individuals who were not on sick leave at the start of treatment but had no
effect for individuals who were on sick leave. The results thus suggest that
CBT is most effective as a preventive measure. MDT was a failure
regardless of the individual’s sick leave status at the time of treatment
initiation. MDT increased sick leave while having no long term impact on
either health care visits or drug prescriptions. The public finance
calculations suggest that the CBT was cost effective as a preventive
measure, but did not compensate for the large costs of the ineffective MDT.
The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 provides the background about
the government initiative and the induced supply of CBT in the Skåne
region. Section 3 outlines the estimation strategy and the data. Section 4
presents the results and Section 5 concludes the paper.