Luxon criticises doctors for wrongly choosing which patients to save from his health cuts
Today National placed their bets on the country being so racist they’d be blinded by rage and entirely forget it was just revealed that their incompetence and/or corruption has killed a woman.
Luxon came out to “slam” the policy of prioritising Maori and Pacifica patients while failing to realise what the hospital is doing is a form of triaging; all else being equal, statistics and probability would predict that the Maori/Pacifica patient is more likely to be in worse health and/or have worse outcomes due to invisible differences that we know about because of statistics. Doctors know that the need is greater.
But more to the point: It’s not the hospital’s fault that Luxon’s lethal level of understaffing has led to these choices being so much more likely to be a matter of life and death.
This government is going too far to interfere in realms that are not its own. David Seymour has become a Te Reo translator overnight and now Luxon wants to tell emergency rooms how to triage patients while his pre-election promises meant this woman died at Rotorua hospital after a three hour wait when her symptoms dictated she should have been seen in one. Yes, that is the hospital which had their doctors diverted to Taupo to help cover their shortage. Their children’s ward is missing a third of its beds, patients are being sent back to ED from the wards, and which will lose its license if it doesn’t hire more doctors. Luxon and Reti keep saying staff are coming while doctors say they’re not and there are unconfirmed rumours that the Ministry of Health offers redundancies to all workers at some hospitals (?? Position unclear, all questions deflected.)
When people cry out for these things to be funded, Luxon says we’re too poor to afford hospitals but economists and bond buyers say we’re not.
If you can lie about everything else, why not just literally lie about killing people? Meanwhile staff are suddenly being put under NDAs and the Ministry of Health are stalling the media on their OIAS.
Luxon swears black and blue the cuts aren’t hitting the front lines, but it’s rapidly becoming apparent that either he’s lying or that doesn’t matter. These job losses are gumming up an already struggling system and at this point even Lester Levy’s gotta be asking himself if maybe the hospitals really aren’t just straight-up underfunded. (Where is old Lester, anyway? Didn’t he have a magic wand for this?)
A woman died when she didn’t need to so landlords like Luxon could have their tax breaks, and she won’t be the first or the last, just the most visible.
How are we all feeling about that?