Auckland surgeons must now consider ethnicity in prioritising patients for operations – some are not happyAuckland surgeons are now being required to consider a patient’s ethnicity alongside other factors when deciding who should get an operation first. We don’t just need more drs and nurses, we need new hospitals, we need new technology, we need new drugs, we need our own basic pharmaceutical industry. What this inclusion of ethnicity as a determinant truly represents is an under-funded public health system forced into making this brutal equation because of grotesque and systemic underfunding. This is a symptom of an underfunded health system using blunt tools like ethnicity to attempt more equitable outcomes. It is an ugly treatment to a much more malicious disease, which is the underfunding of the public health system by starving the State of tax revenue from the wealthiest amongst us.

Source: New Zealand Herald June 20, 2023 03:19 UTC