The Minister of Health, little Simeon Brown, directed Health NZ in March, according to recently released OIA documents, to:.
“Prioritise medium-term (circa 3 years) agreements with private providers prior to moving towards longer-term agreements (circa 10 years),” he wrote to Levy. Such deals would “improve the cost-effectiveness of delivery” and “provide clear investment signals” to the private sector, Brown said.
The PM is obsessed with numbers. Little Simeon Brown follows his leader’s orders and has instructed:
that nearly 10,000 elective surgeries had been performed, most outsourced to private hospitals, putting Health NZ on track to reach its end-of-June target of more than 10,579 operations.
The Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, that hotbed of left-wing radicalism, said
it was “very concerning”. “We were sold outsourcing as a short-term solution to a backlog, and in that situation, it has been moderately successful. “But outsourcing is not a solution to an inadequately funded health system,” RACS president Ros Pochin said.
Outsourcing electives deprived surgical registrars of the training they needed, but it was also much more expensive, said Pochin.
“There’s plenty of studies worldwide showing that private healthcare actually costs more. It’s actually much cheaper to appropriate resource hospitals.
“I understand that the private hospitals needs certainty in terms of contracts, but why don’t we just invest in infrastructure and provide care in the public system where we already have hospitals.
In the interests of short-term numbers to satisfy our current PM what Brown is completely ignoring is where will future generations of medical professionals be trained if our health system is privatised by stealth?
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