Monday 29 January 2007

The culling fund

David Farrar blogs about the culling of people from NZ's die-while-you-wait health system last year.
People got so upset over a cull of a few hundred horses, yet relatively little protests over 35,000 humans being culled from hospital waiting lists last year. It is mind bloggling that Labour can literally throw billions and billions of dollars into this black hole [what you might call the 'Culling Fund'], and not get any significant improvement in terms of elective operations. No wonder so many people have private medical insurance.
I wonder how many of you have private health insurance? (Yes, I do.) How do you feel about it? And how do you feel about paying twice -- once for your health insurance, and once for a die-while-you-wait health system which is slowly becoming a die-while-you-wait-to-get-on-their-list system.

LINK: The big cull - Kiwiblog (David Farrar)

RELATED: Health, Politics-NZ

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Being originally from Canada, I'm just happy I have the option to buy private health insurance even if I am being charged twice; in Canada, it's illegal. Queue-jumping, you see. Better we all have an equal chance of dying in the queue than that some of us pay to get out of the line.

Berend de Boer said...

I have a Dutch passport...

Anonymous said...

"It is mind bloggling that Labour can literally throw billions and billions of dollars into this black hole ... and not get any significant improvement in terms of elective operations."

Mind boggling? Not so. Quite simple and clear really. No prices + little competition + unions + restrictions and regulations = diabolical allocation of resources.

Labour supporters choose to blank it out. Nat supporters find it "mind boggling".

Peter Cresswell said...

"Labour supporters choose to blank it out. Nat supporters find it "mind boggling".

And then they blank it out. ;^)

Good comment, Willy.

Anonymous said...

If only our hospitals were like the one in the TV show House, M.D. It receives hundreds of millions of dollars from voluntary private backers.

it would also be nice if we had doctors as good as Gregory House. ;-)