Roy Heather: Supplementary Estimates — Imprest Supply Debate 
Roy Heather: Supplementary Estimates — Imprest Supply Debate 
[Volume:640;Page:10188] 
HEATHER ROY (Deputy Leader—ACT) 
: 
 I rise to speak in this debate on behalf of the ACT party. One dollar in five of Government spending goes on health and we need to ask ourselves seriously whether we are getting value for that dollar. If there is one thing that scares me in New Zealand these days it is the thought of getting sick and having to depend on a health system that quite frankly is failing in many respects. We know courtesy of a Treasury report that the Government tried to keep quiet that despite Labour spending an extra $4.5 billion a year on health since it came to power there have been no extra health services as a result. The number of Ministry of Health staff has increased by around 40 percent during that time with district health boards and primary health organisation bureaucracies costing this nation over $40 million a year. That would pay for a large number of heart operations hip operations grommet operations and the like. 
What has this extra spending achieved? According to yet another internal report from Treasury absolutely nothing. I quote from one of its reports: “Increased staff numbers have not led to higher outputs.” In the language of everyday people that means not a single extra operation has been performed. In fact when we take into account population growth since 1999 fewer operations are being done now per head of population. I thought that I was over being shocked by the state of our health service but even I was left speechless when told there are now more bureaucrats than hospital beds in the system. That is right; if every single health bureaucrat fell seriously ill tonight then there would not be enough hospital beds for them all let alone for anybody else. 
Jo Goodhew 
: Sad isn’t it. 
HEATHER ROY 
: It is sad; it is not a joke at all. But this might make members laugh. Six years ago this Labour Government set up the Health Workforce Advisory Committee. The Minister knows all about that. It cost $3.5 million and failed to produce a single recommendation. The good news though is that last year after the committee had received almost a million dollars in funding it managed to produce one media release and six reports one of which was its annual report. That is encouraging is it not? 
What those reports did not tell us is that a third of general practitioners are looking to change jobs within 5 years—and can we blame them? The health workforce who are the people who do the work that matters—the doctors the nurses and the health professionals—face the daily nightmare of struggling to care for the country’s sick while an army of bureaucrats monitor each other’s outputs. Outputs indeed. How about some input? How about patients being able to see a specialist when they need to? Instead district health boards have been told to send people on the waiting list back to their doctors. It is called “Hodgson’s choice”. Some choice! We know courtesy of a leaked document from the Waitemata District Health Board that the board was threatened with a $3 million penalty if it did not wipe 800 people from its waiting list and send them back to their general practitioners. “Waiting lists” the board said “what waiting list? There isn’t one. We’ve sent them all back.” That is 800 patients just wiped from a waiting list and that number is just in Waitemata. 
What about the rest of the country where this very same deceit is going on? This Government thinks that if we send patients back to their general practitioners then we do not have to worry about them. The general practitioners sent those patients to the hospitals in the first place either for a second opinion or because they felt those patients were in need of specialist care. This has to be the cruellest hoax of all: a cull of the waiting list in order to put a healthy face on this Labour Government’s woeful incompetence and disregard for the sick and the vulnerable in our society. 
We are now paying more tax than ever but increasing numbers of us are not receiving the Government services that we pay for. People who can afford to though can pay twice if they choose to by using private health care. They really have to queue but those who are less well off have no choice but to wait and to wait. Any decent democracy is judged by the way it cares for its least fortunate and making people wait for health care or worse denying that they even exist is an outrage we should all be ashamed of—even if this present Government is not we should be. Thanks to the cynical abuse of the health system by this Government more Kiwis than ever before are taking out health insurance and 1.3 million Kiwis feel they have to do that because they cannot rely on what they are told will be provided for them.