Our state of health — from the top
Minister Andrew Little talks of reform, big spending and staff shortages
‘Instinctively, I don't like the idea of people's ill-health being the source of profit to others.” Health Minister Andrew Little is happy to explain his ideological impulses in a wideranging interview with BusinessDesk. But, since his job includes overseeing billions spent on non-state suppliers, there are many such profit-makers that he “accepts”.
“Whether it's GPs, whether it's private hospitals, whether it's residential care, the nominally private part of health is significant.
“We need it. We need all the beds, and all the services that they operate, so that won't change in a hurry,'' he said.
“If we were to say ‘Well, actually, it would be better if they were all fully managed by public organisations', we just couldn’t do it at the moment.
“So, we just accept the mix that we've got at the moment.”
Scrutiny of the private sector’s involvement in healthcare is central to our newly launched investigative series The Business of Health.
It's a project Little supports, because “there are some people who are doing very well out of health”.
Naturally, the tide of funding mainly originates with central Government. “The private health sector is heavily dependent on what it earns from the state,'' Little said. ``There are not many parts of the health sector, public and private, that don't have a significant input of the public dollar.
“There are people whose work is in the health sector, and who generate pretty healthy revenue. That is true. I make no judgment
about that. It is what it is.”
Pending spending
There’s no doubt that the Labour Government has turned on the funding taps, with a 40 per cent increase in annual core Crown spending on health in 2021 compared with 2017. But with blistering criticisms of the ministry’s inefficient procurement practices, an investigation of Covid-era procurement by the Auditor-General and hefty sums put towards centralisation reforms, is he confident this increased budget is being spent well?
“I can't . . . say I can totally guarantee that there's goodquality spending right across the board,” Little said.
“I'm pretty sure that within the $24 billion budget, right at the moment, there will be areas that we can do better-quality spending, get some efficiencies and put them back into frontline health. “Can I be sure that the eyes are being run over every renewal of every third-party contract to every health-service provider? No, but my