Hague Kevin: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 20 May 2014. Volume:699;Page:18152. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): I want to begin by praising what I thought was one of the few positive aspects of the Government’s treatment of health in the Budget and that is the stated intention to in future years fully subsidise visits to general practitioners and dispensing fees for children under the age of 13. It is a good initiative. It seems to have been a little rushed in its preparation and certainly stands at odds with National’s previous position which was that there were no financial barriers to primary care but it is none the less welcome.However it is a bit like we have invited Bill English around to our house for our birthday and he has brought a birthday present but while he was in the house he has ripped off a whole lot of our stuff. Because that particular bauble—the free doctors visits and the free dispensing—is there to disguise the deeper message in the Budget. That deeper message is one of actually underfunding the health sector by a very serious amount. Only a fool or a charlatan would look to the CPI as being the benchmark against which health increases should be measured but unfortunately that is what the Government has done. The reality is that health need increases by factors that are not just about inflation. There are more of us every year. On average we are older and on average our health services need to deal with a more complex pattern of particularly chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Also whenever there is a new medicine approved it typically costs more than the medicine it is replacing. A new bit of imaging kit usually costs more than the equipment it replaces. So health services funding needs to increase by substantially more than the CPI.In this year’s Budget district health board - provided services were short-funded by almost $100 million on just the demographic factors alone. If we take into account technology changes district health board services and non - district health boardservices alike are in combination short-funded by about $350 million on what is required just to be able to tread water against that pattern of increasing need. This is not the first year that this has happened. That has actually been the pattern—the Government short-changing health services on what they require in order to be able to tread water—in every Budget under this Government. No wonder that in our newspapers every day we are reading about health services worn thin worn threadbare services being stopped and service quality being compromised. That is the kind of situation that our district health board services and in particular our community-based services have to deal with.The simple fact is that although the one-off gems like these free doctors visits and like the genuine increases to elective surgery have been winners there have been losers too. Those losers have typically been in the primary care services in the community-based services which we all know actually need to be increased in order for this country to try to deal with the pattern of increasing disease particularly increasing chronic disease.The fact is that this Government is robbing the services that we know are required to deal with our long-term health needs to fund services—mainly for political gain actually—for political risk management with a short-term focus. Every child in this country and every New Zealander deserves to live a good healthy happy life. That requires long-term investment. It needs prudent decisions made in the long-term interests of New Zealanders. That is the reverse of the way that this Government has approached the health budget.