Single-payer socialized medicine a
killer in New Zealand
New Zealand's highly touted free cradle-to-the-grave public
health system was in tatters Sunday after the death of a man whose family
had for three weeks desperately tried to make health authorities give him
life-extending medical treatment. Rau Williams died in Whangarei Hospital,
north of Auckland, just hours after the Court of Appeal, in an emergency
sitting, ruled that hospital managers Northland Health did not need to
resume kidney dialysis treatment. "He was drowned by three top judges
and two clinicians," his nephew Jim Shortland said.
The Williams saga has starkly personified an intense
political debate as the coalition government tries to reign in health spending
by what amounts to a
rationing system. When Northland Health refused to resume dialysis treatment
for Williams he was, in effect, left to die, albeit with good palliative
care.The private Life Care Trust last week purchased a dialysis machine
for Williams and flew in an Australian renal specialist. But Whangarei
Hospital would not allow the specialist to examine Williams without New
Zealand registration. Maori Affairs Minister Tau Henare condemned his own
government's health policy, saying it was a "death sentence"
on one of his constituents. Earlier this month a protest march to the hospital
attracted 200 marchers and an angry government MP, John Banks, who said
if the Prime Minister Jim Bolger had needed dialysis he would have got
it. But associate Health Minister Tuariki Delamere said health rationing
was now a fact of life. "We are all going to meet our maker one day
and it doesn't matter how much funding you pour into it," he told
Sunday News.
Although formal rationing has not previously been acknowledged in New Zealand, from next July all sick New Zealanders referred for surgery in the public health system will be scored for points on clinical and social criteria to determine when they will be treated. English said the booking system that will come with it will be the "most honest" rationing the country has seen. It will replace a waiting list system which currently has more than 93,000 people waiting for surgery. "What we have now can't be defined," English told the Sunday Times. "Whether you got elective surgery could depend on where you lived, which is bizarre. I can't see any ethical basis for that. With this, people will get some certainty out of the public health system." As English tries to sell the new system, a report leaked Saturday to the New Zealand Herald said hospital funding cuts would result in early deaths, blindness, deafness, undiagnosed cancer, increased abortions, infertility, amputations and strokes.
The report by Health Waikato doctors said people
needing semi-urgent and routine operations would now have to seek private
care. "We are heading to a crisis, the public health service is teetering
on the edge of a cliff," the executive director of the Association
of Salaried Medical Specialists, Ian Powell, said in reaction.
(Nando Net, Agence France-Presse, October
11, 1997)
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