Mike's Minute: There's dumb games being played in health

The Mike Hosking Breakfast

There are some dumb games being played at the moment in the very serious business of health.

Health NZ is in the red to the tune of $1.7b - that's for the year. They are over budget by $1.7b.

That’s why Lester Levy got to be Commissioner and all the others were let go.

Game one is the Labour Party, who have of course zero credibility when it comes to money, who are claiming the $1.7b is because Health NZ is underfunded.

I have seen the budget-on-budget comparisons. They are not underfunded.

Ayesha Verrall is playing with numbers in a "Ginny Andersen-have-you-see-how-many-cops-are-on-the-beat" kind of way.

Dumb game number two comes from the unions, also with zero credibility around economics. They argue their equity pay claim, this was when we gave nurses a massive pay rise of $400m, should not be part of the $1.7b because they were told it was coming from "another pot".

Sadly other pots aren't real. What's real is what it costs to run the health system and what it costs is more than they have, hence they are in the red to the tune of $1.7b and part of the cost is what we pay nurses.

The culmination of Labour and the unions’ dumb game is that, allegedly, the Government are manufacturing a crisis.

The trouble with numbers, generally speaking, is they are what they are.

We deal with this daily with our bank balances. If we are overdrawn we are, generally, not manufacturing a crisis or we haven't been underfunded, we are just overdrawn and we need to live within our means.

The unions and the Labour Party have never really had any trouble living beyond their means and that is why, more broadly speaking economically, we have had three recessions in two years.

We have not, and still don’t, pay our way.

If there's any good news it's that at $1.7b a year, surely there is a lot of waste in there?

If Erica Stanford can find $100m on a Māori language course that was producing little if anything, Lord only knows what you can find in the $30b of health money.

But the most valuable skill we can bring to such matters at the moment is realism. Economic realism.

We are broke. We are overspending. And fudging numbers and playing dumb games doesn’t help.

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