Media release from the Green Party Health and Wellbeing spokesperson Kevin Hague

Green Party Health and Wellbeing spokesperson Kevin Hague said that the report from the taskforce led by Murray Horn, released by the Minister of Health, Tony Ryall, today represents a mishmash of sound analysis of some of the problems besetting the health sector along with dopey restructuring proposals.

"It is useful to catalyse debate about how best we spend what will inevitably be a limited health budget in the face of an effectively unlimited need. It's useful to talk through how best we make services higher quality and more productive."

"But virtually all of the things that the report suggests need to be done are currently underway. There is already massive investment in quality improvement. DHBs are already collaborating on back office functions. Clinical networks are already being developed. And so on."

"It's great for the Taskforce to endorse all of these directions, but none of these require structural change to work better. In fact the kind of restructuring proposed in the report will hold things back by giving the appearance of activity while slowing change down through the inertia that inevitably follows restructuring."

Mr Hague said that the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists had things right in describing the report as muddled and disguising unpalatable structural change and privatisation ideas with the sugar coating of quality improvement and moving staff onto the frontline.

"The structural changes proposed here are mostly ideological ideas looking for a problem. There is no evidence, for example, that the Ministry's funding and monitoring functions are getting in the way of its policy advice - in fact the reverse is true, with better policy informed by what's happening in the real world. Rather the gutting of the Ministry of Health is driven by the political philosophy that guided Treasury in the 1980s."

"A cursory examination will be sufficient to see that having two organisations doing the work that one previously did is a recipe, in most cases, for increasing rather than reducing bureaucracy. The report's suggestion that all of these functions stripped out of the Ministry should now sit with the Crown Health Financing Agency - effectively the health sector's bank - is completely bizarre. The CHFA has no expertise in these areas at all, and the main effects would seem likely to be organisational paralysis in both agencies, and frustration for DHBs needing to deal with them."

Mr Hague said that other changes proposed seemed like expensive and unwieldy structural solutions to problems better addressed simply by clearer direction from the Minister.

"Tony Ryall can give DHBs direction. If he wants them to do more or less of something, he just has to say so. Of course he then has to take responsibility for his decisions, perhaps explaining why this simple solution is out of favour."

Mr Hague said that the expanded role for Pharmac would be a welcome development, but most other changes were wildly misconceived.

He also again drew attention to the Taskforce's discussion of how to ration healthcare, where the idea is advanced that this might be done on the basis of ability to contribute to economic growth.

"The idea that health services should be some kind of servant of economic growth is obnoxious in the extreme. The cart has been put before the horse: the economy should instead be the servant of the true goals New Zealanders have for our society of health, wellbeing and happiness."

Mr Hague said that the discussion in the report of some services, and of rationing supported his earlier speculation that Tony Ryall was softening up New Zealanders for greater privatisation and cost shifting from the Government, requiring more New Zealanders to take out health insurance.

"This year's Budget shows that the Government intends to spend less on Health in the future, and everything they have done since suggests that they intend to make up the shortfall by increasing the proportion of people who pay for services privately."

"The galling thing is that for ideological reasons the Government has also set about dismantling all of the programmes intended to keep people healthy for longer and reduce chronic conditions, thereby closing the gap between supply and demand.

"If the Green Party were in Government we would certainly be looking to improve productivity and quality, and we'd be talking with New Zealanders about how best to make decisions about the limits to care, but we would also be doing everything we could to keep people well in the first place. It is a great shame that Government has chosen to keep on its ideological blinkers."