Hot on the heels of their cancellation of Dunedin hospital (meaning a cut to health services in half the south Island), National has revealed the next part of their agenda: the outright privatisation of the health system:
The health agency is suggesting the Government to consider allowing private companies to build – and potentially run – the country’s public hospitals.They're also hugely expensive, wasteful, and inevitably corrupt. You just need to look at Transmission Gully or the UK's Private Finance Initiative to see what a disaster they are for the public. But the contract providers laugh all the way to the bank.[...]
Earlier this year, Health New Zealand told ministers given the scale of investment required, "a range of options for different financing and commercial arrangements may be needed".
Build and leaseback arrangements, where private companies own the buildings, would help free up funds.
They also floated "Public Private Partnerships", and said they are widely used overseas.
Health NZ chief infrastructure and investment officer Jeremy Holman said PPPs are "a whole spectrum of how the private sector could work with the private sector from that side of it so there are many different options in there".
National seems intent on destroying our entire society - the schools, the hospitals, te Tiriti, our democracy - in favour of an economy focused on corrupt capitalist extraction and rent-gouging. All that will be left will be motorways leading to airports and gas wells (at least until rising sea levels wash them all away). As for what to do about it, as with everything else this government is doing, the opposition needs to be crystal clear: this will be repealed on day one. Contracts will be legislatively revoked, with no compensation to contractors, and the health system returned to public ownership and control. Those who steal from us will not be allowed to profit from it.
