How do I put this in a nice way?
I think Kiwis are very easily led by their ignorance and petty bigotry by astro turf right wing groups who manipulate that ignorance and petty bigotry into voting for their interests masquerading as self righteousness.
TDB has warned time and time and time again that ACTs Todd Stephenson was a pimp for the pharmaceutical industry and lo and behold the deregulation agenda that erodes public health while enriching that pharmaceutical industry is upon us, as Bernard Hickey points out…
A shocking plan to deregulate pharmacies
Lanny Wong is shocked at Casey Costello’s plans in a Cabinet paper to deregulate pharmacies, allowing big corporates to expand massively & risking the creation of US-style hub-and-spoke ‘pill mills’
Lanny said she was shocked at the details revealed in full in Cabinet papersreleased proactively on Monday, particularly because there had been no consultation with the pharmacy sector, which would be upended by the removal of its current regulatory model. Costello barely mentioned the likely industry transformation in a release on Tuesday titled: ‘Medical Product Bill taking shape.’
Costello characterised the deregulation as “allowing for more flexibility and innovation that will improve safe access to medicines and healthcare,” but Lanny, who is the spokesperson for the Independent Community Pharmacy Group(ICPG), said the reforms risked creating a US-style sector dominated by big corporates, where turnover and profit are prioritised over the health of customers and communities served by pharmacists, who own the businesses and live in those communities.
…we are also seeing this privatisation of health with our GPs…
Patients worry about rise of corporate-owned GP clinics, but they say judge us ‘on the outcomes’
The number of doctors working in GP-owned practices has dropped from 73 percent in 2015 to 64 percent in 2022, while the number employed by corporate-owned clinics doubled in the same period to 14 percent.
Former head of the senior doctors’ union, Ian Powell, a long-time critic of corporate ownership, said the drive to boost profits for shareholders could create “perverse incentives”.
“What can happen is the pressure is on to reduce the time for patient consultation in order to increase the number of patients who are enrolled with the practice, in order to get more funding through the capitation system.”
…and the private contracts we are awarding the private health industry…
Health NZ told to give private hospitals 10-year outsourcing contracts
Private hospital outsourcing contracts tended to be short-term in the past, but Health NZ has been negotiating three-year panel agreements with private hospitals that guarantee high volumes of “low complexity” patients.
…this Government is strangling public health by purposely underfunding it while they hand out billions in tax cuts, landlord loopholes, military spending and the tobacco industry WHILE handing juicy contracts to the private health industry and you all went with it because the country had a temper tantrum at Jacinda.
The kid transitioning, that environmentalist, that academic, that Māori demanding the Treaty be honoured ARE NOT YOUR ENEMY!
Your enemy is who it has always been, the Corporations, the Billionaire Class, the Banks and the Polluters who mask their interests by playing to culture war spite and malice.
Get off your knees for Corporate interests Kiwi.
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Health and education services are the responsibility of us together through the Government. So all dividends from that activity must go to that function. Make profits from these activities illegal.
Cataract operations. 2015 I needed both eyes done. Public wait for ever and suffer. $5000 instantly got the right eye done. And surgeon helped with a private contact to got the left eye done.
They’re traitors to the common good. Exactly they want to make money and profit for their mates. The same old parasitisation destroying the common good.
” The privatisation by stealth occurring in our Public health system. ”
We shouldn’t allow it and it must be stopped. This is what you get when voting is a casual affair while being enrolled to vote is mandatory. [They] must know who you are while [they] must make sure you remain powerless. And that, I’ll be brave enough to write, is precisely why AO/NZ and we people are where and why we are. Squabbling for scraps at the bottom of a pile of urban multi-billionaires on a country of primary industry farmers, who are fucked by the way and been deliberately so.
What’s more worrying is that all I can do is to come here and write fuck words. The moment I sign out, I’m fucked and so are you and you. There’s no mechanism available to us to take that next step to resisting what’s happened which is now morbidly overcoming us. Why do we more represent a day old chicken in a food blender than a strong unity of people willing and able to defend our paradise?
We have as the national/act/enzed first government an entire university of liars, cheats and swindlers with years of combined expertise born of experience. National in particular who are so adept at misleading us that I’m surprised they haven’t yet sold us a *monorail and all we can do is come here and hiss and spit at them.
We have an opposition politic comprising of gutless-loser Labour politicians who carry their balls around in a warm tea cup while sharing knitting patters while hoping to keep roger douglas’s neoliberalism all warm and comfy and safely hidden out of sight as the scumbag oozes toxin effluvium into our organic rolled oats.
How did we get to this point is a compelling question to ask of ourselves. How did this happen to us? How the fuck did we not see this coming? Stop looking around! There’s no one there except us and it’s WE who let this happen. WE, did this by our laziness born of our far ‘too comfortable to complain’ position. We were lured down an alleyway by university educated pimps and con artists who followed us home and now they’re setting us up acquiesce to them selling our AO/NZ for wealth theft by stealth.
* The monorail song.
https://youtu.be/ZDOI0cq6GZM?si=PoBDwuJGkPE5Mi9v
Big Pharma have hated Pharmac since the dawn of time, and anything likely to give them increased access to price gouge New Zealander’s like they do their enslaved American “clients” is great in their book. US vested interests have their cancerous hooks into some of our politicians, and it’s becoming increasingly brazen. The last thing we need in this country is the arrival of CVS and Walgreens, or their badly-disguised for more palatable local consumption facsimiles. I’m sure private equity would love to start purchasing hospitals here too.
The US healthcare system is a shining example of everything a healthcare system shouldn’t be, and anyone intent on importing it is a traitor to the nation.