Firstly, our spend on medicines through Pharmac has always been woefully low. It pales beside Australia’s investment and that’s never made sense to me.
Medicines funded by Pharmac save money within the health system preventing ongoing costs through hospitalisation and ongoing care.
The way we’ve underfunded it has been a false economy.
But successive government’s have found excuses to keep it running on fumes.
So it should be appropriately funded.
But it isn’t.
So now National has decided to rob Peter to pay Paul by reducing our foreign aid.
Not all of it. About 10 per cent of it.
But that will still be enough to lower our perception as a compassionate country actively participating on the world stage.
In an ideal world we would be wealthy enough to fund both.
But we’re not. And in that is more proof that we are a shadow of the country we used to be.
Andrew Dickens is a broadcaster with Newstalk ZB. - where this article was sourced.
3 comments:
Well, NZ is the same population as Sydney with certainly lots less net contributors. Just look around.
We just tell ourselves we are rich enough to continually hand over money to other nations. No improvement demanded, just flash the cash and feel good about ourselves. Pay more tax so we can send it overseas for others, all while the working people struggle.
As for the 'developing' countries, you would think that, with the billions sent to them by the despicable white men over the decades, they would be rich and prosperous by now. Instead, like a growing NZ cohort, they just demand more and more free stuff.
I wonder whethe CXH understands how foreign aid actually works. I'm afraid it's rather less dramatic than a rich country handing over money to a poor country.
The reality is that rich country either requires poor country to spend the money on rich country's goods and services, or rich country's government buys goods and services from its own citizens and sends them directly to poor country.
Either way the citizens of rich country benefit. Cutting foreign aid can therefore actually damage rich country's economy unless the surplus goods can be diverted to alternative markets.
A recent real-life example of this was Donald Trump's elimination of USAID and in the process destroying the livelihood of many US farmers dedicated to growing the crops gifted under USAID'S food programs.
Foreign aid rarely has anything to do with charity. Or splashing the cash!
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