Our Health Policy Eliminates Costs for GP Visits, Dental, Optical, and Audiology Services

The Alliance Party has announced its health policy, which includes the elimination of costs for GP visits, dental, optical, and audiology services.

In order to achieve this, the policy creates the Community Health Service (CHS) as the main funding and logistical service to bring primary and allied health services into the public service.

Existing services have the option to join the CHS, with the CHS covering the costs of the practice, including rent, payroll, administration, and information technology. The staff would be employed by the CHS.

For the patients, there would be very few changes in the short term. The CHS would take over the practice, but the patients would still see the same doctors, and it would still be the same clinic. The biggest change would be that appointments would be free.

The CHS would also change how the system is funded. Primary care funding moves beyond capitation, with money allocated for things like chronic care clinics. Community and hospital services would then be funded as one system, so that keeping someone out of hospital counts as a win rather than a hospital losing the funding for treating them.

Alliance health spokesperson and candidate for Christchurch East, Ethan Gullery, says this is a positive step towards a fully integrated health care system.

“Right now, we treat the system as a bunch of disconnected pieces, funding hospitals one way and funding clinics another. We know that the best care is earliest care, but the focus is on the secondary care system. The Alliance wants to change that.”

In the Alliance's CHS model, community and primary care workers would be equal to their secondary care colleagues in pay and would come under the existing collective agreements. Māori health providers would keep the option to remain independent, with full funding and pay equity for their staff either way.

“A fragmented system means a fragmented workforce, negotiating with many employers, trying to get the bare minimum.”

Mr Gullery says this change is the shakeup needed.

“We have heard from GPs and GP practices, and it has become obvious in those conversations that very few people become doctors in order to end up being small businesspeople. Not only that but they are running small businesses in an area where the economics stopped being favourable decades ago. The Alliance is the only party willing to stand up and say the entire system needs to change.”