Is the New Zealand Healthcare System Doing Badly?

By international standards the New Zealand healthcare system appears satisfactory – certainly no worse generally than average. Yet it is undergoing another redisorganisation.

While doing some unrelated work, I came across some international data on the healthcare sector which seemed to contradict my – and the conventional wisdom’s – view of the healthcare sector. Broadly, the sector seems to be performing relatively well and does not seem underfunded compared to other OECD healthcare systems.

The details are here but, in summary, the OECD report thought that we were close to the OECD average on most of its health indicators, but we were better than average in regard to self-rated health, smoking, air pollution, and effective secondary care (dealing with heart attacks and stroke). We were doing badly only on obesity (we knew that). In the international pecking order our health expenditure is seventh as a share of GDP and sixth if we adjust for the age-structure (we have a relatively younger population than those ranked close to us) and for price differences (the cost of the same care is lower).

Read more here.