Labour MPs Dr Ayesha Verrall and Jan Tinetti held a public meeting about the New Zealand health system in Tauranga on October 1. Photo / Bijou Johnson
Labour MP and health spokesperson Dr Ayesha Verrall says healthcare has become “out of reach for even middle New Zealanders”.
Verrall and Tauranga-based Labour MP Jan Tinetti held a public meeting about the health system at The Kollective in Tauranga on Wednesday.
Belinda Lujan-Quilty, a social worker at a community centre, told NZME she attended the meeting because many of her clients were struggling to afford basic necessities, such as doctors’ visits or dental care.
“Middle-class families are squeezed.”
She said many were beneficiaries with a Community Services Card, which helped bring GP visit costs down - although some still couldn’t afford the “$19 or so”.
“On top of that, there’s the wait.
“If it’s urgent, and you can’t see your GP for three or four weeks, you have to go down to 2nd Avenue [Accident and HealthCare].
“So sometimes, instead of paying for groceries, they’ll go to urgent care because they’ll get turned away at the hospital. It could be a 78-hour wait.”
Lujan-Quilty said she wanted to know if Labour could come up with a means-tested scheme where middle-class people could have a card – similar to the community services card – offering reduced-cost healthcare.
Verrall told NZME before the meeting that she was consistently hearing it was “getting harder to access healthcare”.
“Doctors are going on strike, and the cost of GP care is going up.
“One of the most obvious ways we can see it is now one in six New Zealanders say they can’t afford to go to the GP,” she said.
Labour this week published an open letter to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, demanding the high cost of seeing a doctor be fixed.
Verrall said recently completed upgrades to Tauranga Hospital, worth $21 million, were “useful” but “not likely to change emergency department wait times”.
Verrall said emergency departments were full of people who missed out on getting care in the community earlier.
Health Minister Simeon Brown released performance data showing more Bay of Plenty patients were being seen within four months for first specialist assessment and elective procedures compared to earlier this year.
“What that didn’t show is nationally, the performance indicator has got worse under this Government,” Verrall said in response.
She described other actions taken by the Government, such as outsourcing elective surgeries to the private sector to reduce elective surgery waitlists, as a “short-term solution”.
“They have the wrong priorities.”
Verrall said the "$300 million tax break" the Government granted tobacco companies “would go an awful long way to settling the nurses’ pay claim or the senior doctors, or reducing a lot of the co-payments people are paying at the GPs”.
She said public hospital recruitment difficulties would eventually “drive us towards an American health system where you get care on the basis of your ability to pay”.
“In this cost-of-living crisis, healthcare is out of reach for even middle New Zealanders.”
Brown said in response that Labour spent six years promising to fix healthcare but left the system in worse shape.
“Instead of delivering for patients, they pushed through a botched merger in the middle of a pandemic … "
“Labour’s record speaks for itself: emergency department wait times soared, specialist and elective surgery waitlists blew out, and childhood immunisation rates plummeted.
“They scrapped the DHBs without putting in place the systems needed to deliver consistent care, and patients paid the price.”
Brown said the Government was “fixing that”, with record health funding of “more than $30 billion this year alone”, putting patients first and improving outcomes.
“We’ve reinstated health targets to drive accountability, and already we are seeing progress: more patients are being treated faster in emergency departments, more children are being immunised, more cancer patients are receiving treatment faster, and fewer people are waiting for a first specialist assessment or surgery.”
He said the Government was “delivering results, restoring accountability, and putting patients back at the centre of healthcare”.
Bijou Johnson is a multimedia journalist based in the Bay of Plenty. A passionate writer and reader, she grew up in Tauranga and developed a love for journalism while exploring various disciplines at university. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Classical Studies from Massey University.