Ryan Bridge: Will we ever have enough money to spend on health?

Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

Here's a question for you this morning - How much will ever be enough to spend on health?

The answer is there will never be enough, so you got to make do with what you got.

At least that is what Health New Zealand is trying to do.

At the moment, we spend $30 billion bucks a year, that's just taxpayer money on health. It is middle of the road for the OECD in terms of percentage of GDP comparisons.

According to Health New Zealand we're ahead of the likes of the UK, Canada and Sweden, but we're behind France, Switzerland and Germany.

I mean, really, what does all this mean?

Whether that spending is any good or not is another matter. Ask a hundred people about their experience in the health system and you'll get 100 different answers.

One answer though, that we should be getting a bit more right, is exactly how much we're spending or planning to spend on health because how can you know what you're doing unless you know what you're spending and on what?

Health New Zealand revised down its deficit for 24/25 from $1.7 billion to $1.1.

What does that mean? It means as recently as October, they told us they'd need $500 million more dollars to run the health system than they did yesterday.

That's half a billion bucks difference in less than two months.

Why? They thought they'd have to pay more for redundancy payments and making up for holiday pay.

It seems extraordinary, doesn't it, that you could have such a vast difference in such a short space of time?

How does this keep happening?

It comes after the target surplus for this year, $54 million, somehow morphed into a deficit of $700 million.

Shane Reti and Ayesha Verrall are predictably fighting over whose fault this is, as you would expect from politicians.

But if we could be a little clearer on the diagnosis, the dollars and the cents being spent, we'd at least be clearer on exactly what it is we're fighting about.

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