ACT welcomes move to bolster health services with private care

The Health Minister has directed Health NZ to offer private hospitals 10-year contracts for elective surgeries. ACT Health spokesperson Todd Stephenson welcomes this, and says the approach could be taken further:

"This is good news for patients, and for the taxpayer.

"ACT has always championed government partnering with the private sector on health. The attitude of politicians should be 'whatever gets the job done, for a fair price', not 'how can we prop up the bureaucracy'.

"When private hospitals have long-term certainty of revenue, they can have the confidence to invest in more staff and equipment. This means Kiwis get treated faster, and it increases the total capacity of our health system. Private hospitals can pick up the slack when the public system is backed up with more urgent care.

"We could go further. We could contract out more diagnostic procedures like endoscopies, colonoscopies, and MRI scans, and expand the variety of services contracted out to include specialist services like glaucoma or prostate surgery, and even non-surgical interventions like pain management or follow-up care for diabetes or arthritis."

"ACT can see a future where the Government is primarily a purchaser, not a provider, of health services. Private operators have stronger incentives both to provide quality care and to keep costs down. If they don't deliver, they risk losing their contract.

"If we fully rejected Labour's squeamishness over private healthcare, we could be far more ambitious in our health targets. In 2023, 28,000 New Zealanders waited longer than four months for elective surgery. That number could be zero."

"Most New Zealanders don’t care who provides the service, they care about getting off the waitlist and back to living their lives. Using every bit of capacity across the system means more elective surgeries today, without waiting years for Wellington to spend millions building more hospitals."