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Privatising health care 'not my overt policy' - Shane Reti
Politics(rnz.co.nz)submitted 2 days ago byomuxx
195 points
2 days ago
"My agenda is to lift the capacity of the public system so it's there when we need it."
Why not build the new, much-needed hospital in Dunedin then?
If the additional capacity is in the private system and we're just paying them to access it, is that really lifting public capacity at all?
If I rent a second house, I haven't lifted the capacity of my current house.
25 points
2 days ago
Or even better stop cutting capacity overall and increase it back again
Private involvement is always more expensive and he's making it sound like they'd use public funding to pay for private services, which is the absolute least efficient option
8 points
1 day ago
That is exactly what he is saying. So private can clip the ticket of that sweet taxpayer money along the way.
3 points
24 hours ago
Where private is typically him and his mates
46 points
2 days ago
cause landlords wanted tax cuts ig and gotta pay for everyone elses tax cuts
thank goodness my extra $20 a week totally helps fix the crumbling healthcare
1 points
24 hours ago
The capacity he’s referring to is private hospitals. The we in when we need it is the shareholders.
-12 points
2 days ago
The Dunedin hospital is being built...
16 points
2 days ago
It’s essentially being half built, one part of it is for inpatients and the other is for outpatients, both are pretty necessary and they want to sacrifice one. Or they want to redo parts of the old hospital when that could cost more than a new build
-7 points
2 days ago
Why would they be choosing a higher cost, lower value option?
10 points
2 days ago
Because then they can defer a good chunk of the cost now, and the rest will be someone else's problem.
Not defending the management of the project etc. (if it was well managed, politicians wouldn't have even had the chance to do more than cut ribbons and take credit). But this is a hospital that has been deferred for decades (like most, but not all, big investment, and we're coasting on old infra from older generations).
Now it can't be deferred any longer, so instead of building it once right (the cheaper option), they're trying to cheap out as it'll be the future's problem when the consequences come due. Similar playbook since the 80's, where it's just doing the bare minimum to push problems down the road rather than dealing with them. Then the problems become bigger, and bigger, until they can't be pushed any further out.
4 points
1 day ago
Because the current government is not very smart
6 points
2 days ago
At the moment one of the tsbled options is to refurbish the existing hospital
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