Hutchison Paul: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Hutchison Paul: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:624;Page:19408] 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Port Waikato) 
: 
 I do note any absence of rebuttal of the facts contained in the  
Health and Independence Report 2003 
 which showed that 160000 operations were carried out in 1999 and 157000 in 2003. 
Hon Brian Donnelly 
: How many people are healthier then? 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON 
: Very few. But we have just heard the Minister talking about how we measure health outcomes and she talked about morbidity and mortality. Well if the Minister really wants to know I can tell her that morbidity and mortality have been decreasing in New Zealand over the last 120 years—and so they should be. What we have not seen in the last 5 years is a sudden measurable decrease under the Labour Government. Any improvements are probably the lag from the benefits of the last 10 years under National in actual fact. There is always a lag with morbidity and mortality and the Minister certainly has a very large lacuna when it comes to knowing that. 
I turn now to the question of Ms Clark and the point she made in saying she knew all the arguments about getting better value for money in health spending. After all she indeed was the Minister of Health in 1989 when the Auckland Area Health Board was so dysfunctional that she had to fire her own husband as well as the entire board. 
Steve Chadwick 
: Stop raving on. 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON 
: They say I am raving on but I see almost a déjà vu situation. We have an Auckland District Health Board with a deficit of $44 million this year and next year the board is due to have a deficit of $84 million. So let us have a look at what Ms Clark said in 1997: “The deficit funding of the public sector has to stop. A Labour Government will be looking to negotiate with our public health sector what we need to provide and the cost of providing it. We should fund a balanced budget for our public health services not a deficit budget.” Well I ask the Minister how it is that the Auckland District Health Board this year has a deficit of $44 million and is projected next year to have one of $84 million. The Minister should be embarrassed about it and I hope she will do something about it in this Budget because the legacy that she has left in the Auckland District Health Board over the last 4 years is a disgrace. It is very much like the disaster we all know about that was left by Helen Clark in 1989. We have a health board crippled by problems that have occurred during the time of this Government. 
But let us get back to the scandal of waiting lists under Labour. That party’s members ranted and raved during the 1990s about waiting lists yet under Labour we saw one of the biggest deceptions in the history of health when it said it would fix the waiting list but took 25000 people off that list and sent them back to their general practitioners. As a constituency MP I know that the most frequent visitors I have in my electorate office are people who say they cannot even be seen in order to be put on the waiting list. 
Under this Government if one happens to have common things like varicose veins hernias haemorrhoids or gallstones one cannot be seen unless the condition is very severe. Again I have asked every district health board I have seen at the Health Committee whether they will do those common operations. They say no unless the condition is very severe. That means that those patients come into hospital the operations are complicated the recovery is complicated and those individuals often take a long time off work because they just cannot get to work because of those common difficulties. It is a disgrace that under this Labour Government which has put so much into primary health care and is planning to put in another $1.7 billion in total although one might be able to get to the doctor nothing can be done about it when one actually gets there in terms of some of the common problems.