health

Fat Tax
Using tax to discourage socially undesirable behaviour is commonplace. Smoking, riding motorbikes, and booze are examples. Obesity is a national epidemic, taxing the fat is the cure. ...
8 November 2005 - Gareth Morgan

Once Upon a Waiting List
Get ready to send yourself abroad for common hospital procedures as the NZ health system continues to fall short of patient expectations....
27 November 2003 - Gareth Morgan

Southern Cross little more than a Pyramid Scheme
Pyramid schemes are most often associated with investment. But insurance operators aren't beyond them either....
25 September 2003 - Gareth Morgan

The Terminal Condition of Health Insurance
Southern Cross is viable, its customers successfully trampled underfoot, exploited, spat out...
28 August 2003 - Gareth Morgan

Why a health insurer needs to be sued
One of the more sensible utterings from political leaders on the hustings this month has come from Peter Dunne when he argued that there is only one way to control ballooning public health costs and that is to integrate the private and public health systems in New Zealand. All those people who entered into a contract with private health insurers over...
17 July 2002 - Gareth Morgan

Where have all the policyholders gone?
The move by Southern Cross to raise premiums on the elderly and drop them for younger people is a brave attempt by the insurer to prop up a private health sector business model that has little future. That only one quarter of New Zealanders have private insurance as opposed to the third who bought this product when it was at its...
8 May 2002 - Gareth Morgan

Buying health, getting placebos
The most significant component of government’s growing expenditure is health. Lifting continually by around $400m a year it dwarfs the high profile spending initiatives on the Kiwi Bank, Air New Zealand and rail corridors. The $100m a year spent on Jim Anderton’s industry assistance and the $100m for Pete Hodgson’s technology and...
14 March 2002 - Gareth Morgan

Not to insure to be sure, to be sure
It is to be expected that when an industry's mere existence is subject to questioning, that those employed within it might rise to defend the legitimacy of their day jobs. Questioning of the government's ongoing sponsorship of a our two-tier health arrangements - the public health system as provider of first resort and private insurance as the second tier- ...
6 March 2002 - Gareth Morgan

Why your doctor is a rip-off
The supply-side of the health system is just as crippled as the demand side is unbridled. One of the main villains is without doubt the medical profession itself. If self-interest is the raison d'être its behaviour is rational, but it sits hypocritically with the moral and ethical values which this profession champions ad nauseam elsewhere. Last week I...
26 February 2002 - Gareth Morgan

In Sickness more than in Health
Just before Christmas the government announced it would pour a further $3bn into health - a discourse that people should get used to if they're not already. In the private health, insurance sector premiums rise inexorably while deliverables dwindle. With the ageing of the population and the ongoing technological progress that makes operations more and more...
20 February 2002 - Gareth Morgan

What's your wife worth?
Economists are awful people - they think they can reduce everything to dollars and cents. What's that adage - "they know the cost of everything but the value of nothing". Actually that particular slur is more aptly aimed at accountants. Economics is much more that the study of the next movement in interest rates, though that's the reason...
18 April 2000 - Gareth Morgan

Medical Racketeering?
How would you prefer to die - in an operating theatre because of an inadequacy of expertise to save you, or on a waiting list because of insufficient personnel available to see you? Who cares - both are increasingly likely as the public health model inevitably grinds down to irrelevancy over coming decades. A larger aged population, technology advances...
10 November 1998 - Gareth Morgan

Medicine's Moral Hazard
The "sanctimonious cheats" allegation by Tuariki John Delamere is more symptomatic of political frustration with health reform than it is a meritorious comment by him of the nature of doctors. Specifically, the health reforms have long been heading for a clash with the medical profession's Hippocratic oath wherein a doc pledges to become the...
20 October 1998 - Gareth Morgan