A devastating and factual front-page article on the Health NZ crisis. So what, though?

Knowing there's a problem, and fixing it, are two different things.

I trust that there’s not one person out there still drinking the Kool-aid and believing that Reti’s, Levy’s, Luxon’s and now Simeon’s devastating austerity hasn’t affected patients.

You can’t eliminate 25% of public health positions or 50% of IT positions, or have understaffing of nurses by literally thousands, or leave doctor positions unfilled, or underfund primary care, and not end up with patient care problems that result in preventable deaths.

Political hot air and medical reality are two different things.

But congratulations to @NZHerald’s Knox and Morrah investigative journalists for looking into ED overcrowding, and reporting back with a bleak picture.

We know that international ED overcrowding studies have shown overcrowding and “access block'/bed block” (a confusing name for simply not enough nurses and hospital beds) killed roughly 1 in 83 patients who get marooned in ED longer than 8 hours.

We’ve also known for a while, that your risk of death in a New Zealand ED goes up by 10% if 10% of the ED beds are occupied by blocked by patients that need to be admitted, but have no open beds to get admitted to. It’s horrible for those patients, and for all the patients stuck in the waiting room queued behind them. Bad, delayed care in the ED has a death toll.

It also has impacts on the nurses, docs, and other staff, who know they’re providing substandard and unsafe care with painful and dangerous delays due to understaffing.

Speaking from experience, it’s beyond stressful to manage as many patients as you can in the ED and also have additional patients that you’re piling up in the waiting room, without adequate nursing staff to take good care of either group. Ordering tests on patients you haven’t been able to see, requesting important medications to be given when there’s no nurses actually available to give them. It’s not nice. It would be acceptable in a developing country. But not in a country littered with private hospitals, private clinics, private imaging centres and same-day surgical centres…all diverting taxpayer funding from the public sector. And not in a country seemingly so rich if can afford to let the wealthy make capital gains tax-free.

PM Luxon wouldn’t want this sort of substandard care for his mum.

But then again, his mum very likely wouldn’t experience this sort of thing. Between private hospitals, private insurance, and VIP treatment [do you really think any hospital would keep a Minister waiting 11 hours in ED like this family? Not a chance.]

---

We always hear about the problem… but no corporate newspaper is going to talk about the solution. So most people will never understand there is one.

The public will just keep saying,

Oh well, 30 years ago we had 6 times as many hospital beds per capita than we do today, or

Oh well, my hospital is decrepit and way too small to adequately service my community, or

the doctors and patients will grumble and write letters to the editor.

Just yesterday, in fact, I read that a group of NZ interventional cardiologists (the ones who save your life in a heart attack by emergently opening up blocked coronary arteries and inserting stents) have refused to continue using imaging machinery that is so old it irradiates them and gives unsafe fuzzy pictures of what they’re doing as they snake 3 millimetre stents into hearts. FFS how did we allow this to happen, and why are we allowing the stripping down of public services to now actually accelerate?

While patients lose, and staff lose, and the public loses, there are people who are winning. They are cheering all the way to the bank. Supermarket corporations have made out like bandits. Bank corporations have made record profits. Energy corporations have too. Private insurance companies are enrolling record numbers of people.

If you are a property investor, you’d wish 1,000 blessings on this government and its rich-friendly policies. If you own 20 (or 200) investment properties, you could not be happier: your mortgage interest is now tax-deductible. You could literally save a million dollars a year (that’s how much each of the top 300 property investors are estimated to have profited from this government…per year.)

If you look like Luxon, your life is sweet. His govt changed the law, so now he can flip houses faster and reap the profit sooner. That’s made him something like $600,000 tax-free this year. And let’s remember, unlike almost every other functioning country, New Zealand lets people (especially rich, asset-owning people) pocket their capital-gains-tax-free.

We need a capital gains tax, to prevent the absolute looting of the New Zealand public from continuing. It’s gone on decades too long.

I realise that for someone waiting in an ED waiting room for 7 hours, in pain and scared, they’re not thinking about how laws and tax policy screw them. They have immediate worries. For most NZers, how to pay rent and groceries is worry number 1.

But voting in governments that are stripping NZ for cash isn’t going to make things better. It’s up to us to fix the problem. You must support governments that build the public up, not tear it down. You can’t have a prosperous thriving nation, when people can’t afford good healthcare, affordable food, a house, and an education. What we have got is a government set up to deliver a failed society that is incredible, insanely, profitable for the top 2%.

The wealthy have prospered off the government teat for long enough. Under prior governments, and especially under the current government. We must, for a change, tax the wealthiest accumulators to keep a functional society going.

Or we can just keep letting them sell public assets (our houses, our land, our water) for private gain. Let them keep stripping public services (healthcare, schools) to create the demand for privatisation.

The New Zealand public is in a fightfight against a wrecking ball. It’s an unfair fight, and the public is losing.

Simeon Brown, this month’s minister of health, says ED delays and hospital shortcomings stop with him.

‘The buck stops with him’.

Whatever sir, that’s never been true. The buck stopped with the last guy too, and where’s he slinked off to?

The buck never stops with a politician. The buck always stops with the little guy: the taxpayer, the low-wage worker, the sick patient.

I hope you realise that current-day politics is all smoke and mirrors. It’s tough talk, but it’s hot air.

The system is carefully built to benefit the Luxons of the world: they are absolutely killing it. But it’s the people who actually work for a living that are actually doing all the dying.

—Dr Gary Payinda

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/watch-how-does-your-hospital-emergency-department-ed-rate-herald-investigation-into-the-best-and-worst-performing-eds/FL624446ZNCHBBBZ3Q64XRNT6A/

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/535644/prime-minister-christopher-luxon-sells-another-investment-property

https://www.interest.co.nz/banking/126803/housing-lending-percentage-nzs-banks-total-lending-reaches-70-kpmgs-annual-fips

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/health-system-wellington-mans-11-hour-wait-with-sick-daughter-in-emergency-department/SC6SGTRZBVEGHKBY24WOUSTMI4/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8877301/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9498666/

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/dec/10/thousands-of-patients-die-waiting-for-beds-in-hospitals-study

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1742-6723.13699

#nzpol #capitalgainstax #austerity #neoliberalism #profits #privatisation #wealthtax #InheritanceTax

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/health-nz-scraps-code-black-alert-for-emergency-departments-in-crisis/AMSEKBFBHJHSNNLVX5NMVBZQZM/