Choking on the consultants
BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD
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Rosemary McLeod
OPINION: Coughing your lungs out with some viral update on TB isn't the best state for battling dark forces, but too bad.
I rise from my pillows, dislodging a cat, knocking magazines and a box of tissues to the floor, to shake a quivering digit at a scaremongering new report on healthcare.
It's going to bankrupt us all, chew up every tax dollar for infinities to come, and is holding back economic recovery.
That is the drift of consultancy firm Temple Capital Investment Specialists' look into the national medical cabinet.
It has submitted a report on this looming catastrophe to the Health Ministry and Treasury, complete, I have no doubt, with graphs, many footnotes, and complicated equations.
I take exception on several grounds. The first is that the company admits to being consultants, a term for overpaid opinionated persons who probably cost as much for a week of their time as a dozen brand new operating theatres, complete with surgeons, for giving elderly chaps new hips - and leave nothing to show for it of comparable benefit.
I object that they hallow their scaremongering with the name of "temple", a term once used for a sacred place, wherein a famous Christian once upended the tables of the moneylenders and gave them a good seeing-to.
I choke on my lemon honey drink at the word "capital" associated with this for obvious reasons, and subside in another coughing fit at the next word, "investments".
Really, just reading about them is bad for my health, so I have a raucous paroxysm at the penultimate, "specialists". The cat, by now, has stalked off in disgust.
The Temple people claim that the cost of healthcare is rising so rapidly it could bankrupt a future government, and that we are "addicted to healthcare". Indeed, it calls its report, Health: New Zealand's Untreated Addiction.
And I marvel. Just who is getting all this healthcare, so they can afford the luxury of an addiction? People I know never go to the doctor - or the dentist - because it costs too much, and these are working people.
Others have fun lingering on waiting lists, and having their operations cancelled or rescheduled. Still others - and I include myself here - do not get sick on purpose; in fact, we find it a bore.
Is this report a platform for arguing that people need less healthcare, since addiction usually means excessive consumption?
Presumably a few thousand discreet carks are called for, then, in the national interest. This must explain the vogue for demanding voluntary euthanasia: it solves so many problems, and would free up much capital tied up in estates for investment by specialists. People could get posthumous medals for patriotic exits. That could catch on.
Do people need healthcare, or don't they? Should we decide who deserves it, and who doesn't? Should we encourage a return to the walking stick and lingering invalidism? These are matters that might well be discussed, in an eminently civilised way, in consultants' reports.
What is implicit in such civilised discussion is that any idiot who hasn't got medical insurance deserves what's coming and had better polish up their begging bowl with a clean rag.
Now, if these people had identified illegal drug use as a national addiction they might have had a point.
Rather than rushing to the doctor for every ailment, a good many New Zealanders prefer being jollied-up with a bit of P, and still more smoke dak.
In a fiscal sense, this must be a good idea, since it makes for less of a drag on genuine drug resources. It also makes business people - gangs and suchlike - rich, and rich is good.
Some credit should go, too, to the vitamin and alternative-pills industry, which keeps many more people from bothering doctors.
Rather than issuing panic reports, I'd like to see encouragement for faith healing of all kinds, and surely big handouts to Christian Science would reap wholesome dividends.
Though I have earnestly prayed for this cough to subside, however, it has wilfully refused to oblige.
And isn't that the trouble with sickness? It won't respond to even the most logical entreaties. As with the economy, you just have to crawl under the duvet, cough your lungs out, and wait it out.
- © Fairfax NZ News
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@ Christopher #2: Why shouldn't Rosemary get paid for this article? Consultants get paid for exactly the same thing, except they spend weeks selecting the correct font and ensuring that their branding is at the centre of attention.
"Do people need healthcare, or don't they? Should we decide who deserves it, and who doesn't?"
YES! if my kids lose out on health care to a fat smoker than the answer is YES.
Bob
@ Christopher.
National does want to privatise healthcare, they do want to strip-mine our conservation areas, and they don't care about people who aren't earning less than roughly 500,000 dollars a year.
And I bet you voted for 'em, too.
We don't actually have a Health Service; we have a Medical/Pharmaceutical Industry. A "Service" has a prime function of providing good for the client/customer/user. An "Industry" has a prime function of making money for the participants and shareholders.
Unfortunately in NZ we have a tax-payer subsidised Medical Industry, and a User-Pays health Service. Pharmac hands out zillions to the drug companies, but little or nothing for Health.
Sorry, Rosemary, but the present system will only pay for patented treatment. If you want Health Care you will have to pay the full cost yourself.
I agree with your article , Dompost today.
Well said.
Congrats.
Keep it up, as they say. (Who on earth is Paul Winton??)
Ian Matheson (recent grateful patient) Eastbourne
Wellington
Nicely put, their sort of thinking makes my skin crawl.`Hope you feel better soon, Rosemary.
On the day I read your comment the Minister of Health announces a simple check list for the medical profession to operate on the right side of the right person on the right day begs the question how did so many highly qualified medical personnel get so far for for so long to discover such a wonderful thing as a check list. It defies belief that the Minister had to announce a marvel of medical science being introduced is a mere checklist list. May be if the medical professional focused less on the threat "vitamin and alternative pill industry" you mention and concentrated on their own knitting, then the basics of a checklist might have been introduced a long time ago. I was taught if you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves. Just may be a few more checklists (being the pennies) and then the pounds (the consultants) would go away and look after themselves
We've just experienced how contracting the provision of health services to privately run organisations is probably goint to work.
My 56 year old wife needs 24/7 full time care. Suffering from several inter-related medical conditions she has progressively become so fragile & disabled I had to give up work to become her primary caregiver. (I kept burning out because I was really trying to do two jobs.)
We live in Wellington. We got a certain amount of CCDHB funded assistance - caregivers come for four hours every day - for which we really are extremely grateful. I need to get out and shop, pay bills etc and she can't be left alone. The DHB also funded a carer relief package what enabled me to pay a relief caregiver $76 a day for someone to come in and give me a break every so often if needed e.g. to visit my mother in another city who has just had open heart surgery. I don't use this much as there are very few people I can ask with the hoist and sling and other skills and training needed to look after my wife and help do her home dialysis.
The DHB has just transferred the administration of my wife's health care funding to a privately run company, which I won't identify in case it just might retaliate by negatively reviewing her current needs and services. We all saw what happened when two DPB recipients queried a funding cut.
Now, if I can even find a suitable relief caregiver to come and help out when needed (eg if my mother who is still unwell dies and I need to attend the funeral) I can only pay them $75.56 a day for doing the same job.
Where's that missing 44 cents going? I know it's only a small difference, but over time it adds up, and it's not going to the caregiver, so they've had a pay cut.
As always Rosemary I find your sensationalist drivel mediocre at best. Try writing something that doesn’t require propping up with overly descriptive tangential waffle.
I sincerely hope you don't get paid to write this subjective self indulgent refuse.
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@Jim#9 You're obviously using the wrong consultants! I know several that wouldn't rip you off, that might actually save you some money in the long run...