When healthcare can cause harm

PORTLAND, Ore., July 7 (UPI) -- U.S. healthcare can cause harm when the focus is on providing services instead of improving health, two physicians said in a commentary.

Dr. Charles M. Kilo, chief executive officer of GreenField Health in Portland, Ore., and co-author Dr. Eric B. Larson of Group Health Cooperative in Seattle distinguish health from healthcare -- asserting one can never have too much health but with overuse of medicine one can get so much healthcare it causes harm.

"Although healthcare's objective should be to improve health, its primary emphasis has been on producing services," the authors said in a statement.

Fee-for-service payment encourages using more treatment, new technology and extra testing, the researchers said. These additional services, and their attendant extra costs, may harm health, they said.

Kilo and Larson wrote in the Journal of American Medical Association that the cost pressure that healthcare places on employers, individuals and families has become so significant healthcare may well be inducing aggregate harm to the health of communities when the cost shift involved in funding healthcare is taken into account.

In addition to direct harm from healthcare, which includes adverse physical and emotional effects, indirect harm comes from the collateral effect of the opportunity cost of healthcare spending -- money spent on healthcare that could have been spent on education, jobs and environmental quality, all important determinants of health, the authors said.