Roy Heather: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Roy Heather: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:627;Page:22025] 
HEATHER ROY (ACT) 
: 
 The previous speaker was quite right when she said there is much work yet to be done in health. There is indeed a lot to be done. This year $3.5 billion more was poured into health than went in when Labour came to power in 1999—a 57 percent increase. That is a huge amount and the Government constantly boasts about it. The problem is that it is always easy to spend somebody else’s money. This is not the Government’s money. It is the money of the people of New Zealand the money they have given to the Government—some of which is spent on their behalf on health services. I would like to say here in this Chamber and to New Zealanders that this money is not being wisely spent. 
Figures collated shortly before Labour came to power in September 1999 showed that 180401 people were waiting on surgical waiting lists and waiting to see a specialist for the first time. With an extra $3.5 billion a year and 6 years down the track the number on those lists as at the end of April this year was 180672—an extra 271 patients are waiting on the waiting lists. This is 6 years down the track after Labour claimed that it would slash waiting lists when it came to power. 
Another way of looking at how well the money is being spent on health is to look at the number of operations being performed. I asked the Minister of Health earlier this year how many operations were carried out in the 2000-01 financial year compared with the 2003-04 financial year because those figures were easy to retrieve. She said that the number of case-weighted discharges in 2000-01 was around 270000. Three years later with a population increase of 4.3 percent that figure had reached 273000 and I am rounding up the number slightly. 
So with a population increase and from the numbers she had given me I worked out that per head of population the number of discharges had decreased in that time despite huge injections of cash into health. So fewer operations per head of population are being carried out but basically the same number of people are on waiting lists so what value is the taxpayer getting from the tax dollar? I would contend that it is very bad value. 
When I presented the Minister of Health with these figures—and remember that these are her own figures; they are figures I have been given by the Ministry of Health and by the Minister of Health—she said: “But I’m very proud of the 40000 more discharges that we now have.” the 40000 more operations that she says are being done. 
On 9 June I put down a question for written answer asking the Minister to give some more information on that. When she said: “I will take more responsibility for the 40000 a year more medical and surgical discharges.” I asked: “What is the full yearly breakdown of medical and surgical discharges upon which this is based broken down by financial year and what is the source of this information?”. She made that statement in answer to an oral question I asked but the answer I received to my later question and this is the same answer by and large that I have had to all the questions I have asked in the last 7 weeks was: “It has not been possible to obtain the information required to enable me to respond to this question by the due date.” 
Is that not staggering? She has 4 hours to get an answer to an oral question and she was able to give us a figure in reply to that question but 7 weeks after I asked a question for written answer she still has not been able to get the information. Despite my phoning her office frequently she still seems unable to get this information. So she goes around the country saying we have 40000 more operations but where is the proof? It is not there. 
Unfortunately New Zealanders are being tricked into thinking that this Government is doing a good job in health—that it is doing more operations. Well it is not. These figures are unsubstantiated and they are already included in the figures the Minister has given me. 
This is a disgrace. The Minister of Health keeps saying she has provided New Zealanders with transparency and that figures are readily available to the public. This is not true. The website tells only part of the story and the figures she gives to newspapers around this country and gives to us in this Chamber deal with only part of the problem. 
One of the real difficulties with waiting lists is the category of “active review”. Active review is the waiting list to get on to the waiting list and this continues to grow too.