Jon Voight is right: NZ’s die-while-you wait health system creates “many deaths”

Protesting what he calls Barack Obama’s “obsession with trying to ram this health bill through to create a socialist America,” actor Jon Voight told thousands of anti-ObamaCare protestors in Washington recently:

    We would be no better off than the European countries and Canada and New Zealand who suffer greatly from a poor healthcare system. Their rationing system creates many deaths."

For my American readers who might think that’s hyperbole, that’s certainly true of New Zealand’s die-while-you-wait health “system.” Here’s some posts from NOT PC that demonstrate the point:

• They died of it
  Three Hawkes Bay people have died waiting for coronary bypass surgery . . .
  
• Cold comfort in die-while-you-wait hospitals
  . . .  figures were released revealing that up to one in eight patients at Wellington's hospitals "is the victim of a medical accident, error or mishap," and up to twenty-three patients of Wellington's Capital Coast Health were either killed or endured serious harm through inattention, incompetence and bungling. . . Capital Coast Health apologists issued the airy dismissal that "these problems occur everywhere" . . .
  
• The "human face" of New Zealand's socialist medical system
  The Herald has three more tales showing the "human face" of New Zealand's socialist medical system . . .
  
• Capital Coast: Not just a die-while-you-wait health system
  Following the death of a one-day old baby after her and her mother were released from Wellington hospital just six hours after giving birth, details have now been released under the Official Information Act showing that up to one in eight patients at Wellington's hospitals "is the victim of a medical accident, error or mishap," and up to twenty-three patients of Wellington's Capital Coast Health were either killed or endured serious harm through inattention, incompetence and bungling.
  Radio NZ story here. Dom Post story here.
  The information describes the standard of care at Capital Coast Health as "a shambles." An independent November audit stated that "crisis management was the normal operating environment at Wellington Hospital." And all while government spending on the government's health system has rocketed. The answer is clearly not more of our money.
  
• The Wellington solution
  "It must be wearing," says Stephen Franks, "to work in a spiritless atmosphere - hating management but being cynical about all solutions." Giving a talk to the Auckland Medico-Legal Association, he was told afterwards that “hospital productivity had probably dropped 20% as many medical professionals had given up going the extra mile to cover for system deficiencies.” And all this while govt spending on the govt's die-while-you-wait health system has rocketed.
  
• New ministers, same old failure
  . . . health spending has doubled in the last ten years while education spending has ballooned by 7% a year every year for the last ten years -- an enormous spending binge -- but with almost nothing to show for the deluge of taxpayer money beyond inflated public sector prices and emptier taxpayer pockets: all major health indicators for example have either held steady or declined as waiting lists have continued to climb, while all literacy studies show either decreases in functional literacy or only negligible improvements.
  
• Rationed health care is hardly health care at all
  The Government won't fund Herceptin, a an early-stage drug for breast cancer that has saved lives overseas. It won't fund Gardasil, a vaccine for cervical cancer that promises to save the lives of hundreds of NZ women every year. Hospital waiting lists get ever longer, and hospital salaries here less and less attractive compared to what can be earned elsewhere.
  Lives are being lost, and the people who are saving lives are not being given the tools to do the job. Such is the result of the rationing of health care, which is precisely how government health care is delivered.
  
• When more patients is a good thing
  . . . When this architect is hired by profit-making businesses to design their emergency rooms, his clients actually want him to attract more people inside. In their view, attracting more customers is a good thing, since more customers equals greater profits, and and increased ability to treat even more patients.
  Such are the incentives in private medicine.
  By contrast, when the government builds emergency rooms, more people are a nuisance. More patients equals an increasing strain on limited resources. More people in the emergency room is a problem.
  Such are the disincentives in state-run medicine.
  
• Lindsay Perigo: Wankers, wowsers, waiting lists and Islamofascists
  Ronald Reagan used to tell the story, though not to Mikhail Gorbachev, of the fellow in the late unlamented Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, who bought a car. He was told by a clerk behind a desk that delivery would be seven years three months and five days away. “Morning or afternoon?” asked the buyer. “Morning or afternoon?” echoed the clerk … what difference does it make when it’s seven years three months and five days away?” “Well,” said the buyer, “it has to be the afternoon. The plumber’s coming in the morning.”
  That’s about what it’s like now in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Aotearoa. No, you don’t have to wait for a plumber. You don’t have to queue for bread. There’s no toilet paper shortage. . .  But here in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Aotearoa, Nanny State runs the health system. What does she give us? Waiting lists. How does she reduce the waiting lists? By tearing them up! You don’t get your surgery but you’re no longer on a waiting list because Nanny says you’re not. She’s sent you back to your GP. Now isn’t that reassuring when you’ve got skin cancer. Fat lot of use your GP is there, but Nanny is saying you have to wait till your tumour is really big, by which time it’s more difficult to remove and will probably have metastasised. Nanny’s die-while-you-wait health system is also currently serving up chronic staff shortages and, of course, strikes. Be very … healthy.
  
• The culling fund
  ”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.


• Life-saving private cancer unit opens in Auckland
  . . . contract cancer in Eastern Europe or the UK, for example, and your chances of survival are less than half; but contract cancer in the US, and your chances vault up to nearly two-thirds. The reason Brits are more likely to die? "Cancer experts blamed late diagnosis and long waiting lists." Despite this being all too clear, little has been or can be done to speed up diagnosis or cut waiting times in the die-while-you-wait public system NZ shares with the UK. In other words, people have been dying for the sake of a failed ideology.
  
• Death by ideology
  People are dying because of a failed ideology, says MacDoctor - "an attitude that places ideology above patient care" . . .