Touting for Business: The Private Health Care Sector and our Two-Speed Society

I see that the CEO of the Health Funds Association is touting for business in today's Herald. He is hectoring our low paid economy to increase private funding of health care (which, surprise surprise, helps his members) with the threat that the public system will never, ever be able to provide adequate health coverage. There is no doubt that public sector health provision is a challenging question, but it is galling to see the profit-makers in health simultaneously do down public provision and promote their own products in an economy in which inequality is rife and growing, and the numbers able to afford private health provision are declining. One would hope that the government would be able to respond aggressively to such arguments,. but, of course, we have a government comfortable with growing inequality and more than happy to see public provision privatised. They talk of a two-speed Australian economy. We should be talking of a two-speed NZ society - the haves and the have-nots.