Foreigners responsible for $68.5m of debt written off by New Zealand District Health Boards
9 Jan, 2021 04:00 PM
5 minutes to read
Non-New Zealand residents have left hospitals to write off $62m of debt in the past five years. Photo / 123rf
Foreigners have received almost $204.4 million worth of hospital treatment in New Zealand in the past five years, leaving the taxpayer to foot the bill for a third of that. Data provided by 19 of the country s 20 district health boards revealed more than $68.5m worth of treatment provided to non-New Zealand residents was written-off as bad debt between July 2015 and June 2020, excluding GST.
It is a sum the health minister has labelled as the cost of being a compassionate country .
Is rural generalism best for the Coast?
In recent weeks, various medics and their union have - unusually for the profession - aired their views in this paper on the use of rural generalists , a new breed of doctor increasingly being employed on the West Coast to work both in hospitals and at GP clinics.
Te Nikau Hospital & Health Centre, Greymouth.
Photo: RNZ / Nate McKinnon
For the West Coast District Health Board, rural generalists or rural health specialists, as they re also known, are a godsend: the answer to the region s perennial difficulties in attracting specialists and GPs. But the senior doctors union, the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, has warned of their potential to displace more highly-trained doctors, and ultimately reduce West Coast residents access to that level of care. What is the community supposed to make of this? What exactly are rural generalists and how safe are people in their hands?
Bramley stepped into the breach as acting CDHB chief executive (CE) in August after the sudden resignation of former boss David Meates and six other executive team managers. In October Bramley returned to Nelson-Marlborough and handed over the acting CE role at Canterbury to Andrew Brant, deputy chief executive of the Waitematā District Health Board (WDHB). Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS) executive director Sarah Dalton wished Bramley well but said he had taken on a daunting task to meet demands by the board and the Ministry of Health to reduce the $180 million deficit without cutting services. “It’s a tough gig, I think.”
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And:
E/G is the energy intensity of the GDP
F/E is the carbon footprint of energy
If we want to get F, total carbon to zero, we have to get one of these four factors to zero.
Assuming that at some stage this century we must drive F (total carbon rate) to zero, this implies at least one of these factors must also be zero. But which ones?
Setting P = 0 is the human extinction plan and I think we can rule that one out. Nonetheless humanity is now entering an entirely new demographic state we have never been in before; many developed nations are now at zero or even negative population growth. This has long term implications well worth exploring in a future post.