Waatea News Column: Is our public health sector too sick to save us?

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The latest review into public health has been released and it has managed to utterly ignore Māori grievances and criticism from the disability sector.

At a time of pandemic when we rely on our public health system more than we could have imagined, the lack of a serious debate about health is deeply concerning.

The Ministry of Health are currently in the headlines for the border quarantine fiasco, but we only need to cast our minds back to last years measles epidemic to appreciate how underfunded our public health system has been allowed to fall into.

By allowing so many DHBs to exist to create a false competition model has been a terrible experiment in social policy and like so many neoliberal social policies we are seeing them cracked and broken at the foundation level by this pandemic.

Ignoring Māori criticism about the current health system must be challenged at the election and at some point the Government must reshape Public Health away from an efficiency cost issue for the State and towards what is actually best for citizens health.

First published on Waatea News.

8 COMMENTS

  1. Its not just our public health system that is sick Martyn the entire state system is sick and needs a major operation the plasters have been falling of for years and its taken covid for many of us to realise.

  2. Its not just our public health system that is sick Martyn the entire state system is sick and needs a major operation the plasters have been falling of for years and its taken covid for many of us to realise.

  3. The entire state system is sick and in need of a major op not a plaster the plasters have been falling of.

  4. By the way for those reading this I am not sick it’s my computer that is sick it is old and it keeps saying ‘you are posting too fast’ when i cant go any slower.

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