National is stuffing up health

Mountain Tui has posted a couple of really important posts on health recently.

His post on how the Government is creating a crisis so that it can privatise NZ healthcare strikes a real chord. We have seen 40 years of this sort of behaviour. The first thing right wing governments do is create a crisis. The second thing they do is privatise publicly owned assets and systems and hand them over to their rich mates. Enrichment and not improvement is their only goal.

His further post where’s the oomph is a call to arms to oppose this activity.

Certainly I believe there is a plan to privatise as much of Health as the Government can manage. But there is also the damage being caused to Health through incompetence and the need to cut costs so that they can give landlords a tax break.

Three pieces of evidence which have emerged over the past week to show that this is the case. In terms of dealing with infrastructure issues,

National Party aligned journalist Janet Wilson said this about National’s approach to Dunedin Hospital:

The most important figures to take note of in the hospital debate is the $1.88 billion set aside for the project which has blown out to $2.1b when $225 million for data and digital services is included, and the estimated $3b total cost that Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop and Health Minister Shane Reti claim it “could approach”.

Part of that projected $3b includes $400m for a car park and a pathology lab, which were always part of National’s pre-election pledge anyway.

I was not aware that National had made this extra pledge. But if it had then the increase in cost is directly attributable to its election promise. It needs to own this issue.

Wilson claims that Labour can be criticised for its delay in getting the hospital open. But it funded and fast tracked the resource consent application and part of the new hospital is being built now all during a period of six years. This is putting a major project on steroids. I would challenge anyone to point out such a large complex project being advanced as quickly.

In other Health related news Casey Costello goes from crisis to crisis. It is getting more and more difficult to justify the setting aside of $216 million for a tax cut for Philip Morris in the hope that the use of heated tobacco products would increase.

Her doing her own research on the utility of the use of HTPs is farcical. As is Christopher Luxon’s complete lack of control over the process. Fancy putting aside this much money to subsidise the cost of HTPs and not even have a process in place to measure the effectiveness of the policy.

And that $216 million could be put to other good use, such as for instance the construction costs of a badly needed new Hospital.

Dunedin in particular will remember this.

But the most concerning news was announcement of a billion dollar deficit although it appears that some sleight of hand was used to achieve this.

From Rachel Thomas at the Post:

A $529 million pay equity sum for health workers that never arrived contributed to the deficit at Health NZ – Te Whatu Ora, the agency says.

The head of the nursing union at the heart of two of these claims is describing the revelation as an insult to those on the front line.

In a quarterly report released on Thursday, Health NZ shed light on how and why its finances deteriorated from a forecast surplus of almost $300m to an unaudited deficit of $934m by June 30 this year.

In the high-up summary of the 72-page report, chief executive Margie Apa said the deficit was partly due to one-off factors including write-offs to surplus Covid-19 stock ($193m), Holidays Act payments ($172m), cuts to Hauora Māori funding, higher than expected staffing costs and more outsourcing.

But buried on page 53, the April-June report calls out a payment that never came.

“In 2023/24, we expected to receive $529 million of funding to fully offset pay equity payments to allied health, midwifery and nursing staff. This would have contributed to Health NZ achieving a surplus of $583 million.

“Pay equity funding was not received during the year, resulting in the target surplus expectation reducing to $54 million. Health NZ did not achieve this revised target surplus.”

The payment for pay equity was delayed until September for some reason. But the delay allows the Government to suggest that the sector is in crisis and that funding cuts are necessary.

The adding of extra costs to the Dunedin Hospital project to make it appear to be unaffordable, the reckless allowance for a tax cut for Philip Morris and the fudging of health figures to suggest there is a crisis all point to gross mismanagement of Health at a time when it is under stress.

And the reason why is important to ascertain. It seems pretty clear this Government agrees with the maxim that you should never waste a good crisis.

Stand by and wait for the privatisation push …