Medical cost offset, meta-analysis, and implications for future research and practice - Comment on Chiles et at.

Research continues to increasingly demonstrate a medical cost offset whereby psychological interventions reduce medical care utilization and physical health care costs. Third-party payers in health care, however, remain skeptical that additional costs for psychological services will eventually result in overall cost savings for them. This commentary identifies some of the obstacles in the current health care system that prevent a medical cost offset from being realized and describes remedies to those obstacles.