"I get sick every time I go to the doctor that I still get subsidised and I can't opt out of the system. Now that's wrong. I was trying to take the welfare state off the middle class."
What this atomised mindset misses is that it's not her being subsidised, it's the doctor's surgery. If you want to contribute more according to your means, you do that by raising taxes, in ways that target those on higher incomes.
I've made so my attempts to listen to this interview. I find it painful that Shipley - who is clearly quite intelligent - still can't question her assumptions, despite decades of observing the social consequences of her government's policy.
Listening to her holding forth about taking subsidies from the taxes of average kiwis is mind-boggling. Her government took far more from them by cutting benefits and abolishing universal unionism, creating the casualised, low wage economy we now live in.
Besides, applying means testing to universal services vastly increases bureaucracy, and usually ends up costing more in accountancy than it saves. All while starving public services of the funding they need to improve quality of delivery.
The thought that universal services subsidise the middle class only becomes possible to think within the neoliberal frame of "user pays".
What used to happen in public health, for example, is that the government looked at what funds were needed to maintain clinics and hospitals, pay doctors, nurses and receptionists fairly, and so on, and put that in the budget. Then they left medical staff to triage people seeking care, according to need.
There was never any question of whether the country could afford health care for everyone who needs it. We were and are a wealthy country, of course we can! Especially when there's copious evidence that timely access to health care can avoid much more costly care down the line. Eg recent research showing that removing prescription charges saves more than it costs in hospitalisations for under-treated conditions.
The health budget was treated as an entirely separate matter from whether the overall budget was in deficit or surplus. If it was going to be in deficit, and the money supply didn't need to expand, you'd raise taxes on higher earners to get a surplus. That way, money that might otherwise be spent on private health insurance - ending up in the pockets of insurance companies - goes into maintaining the public health system for everyone who needs it.
Another neoliberal dogma. The implication is that individuals can achieve the same thing with each dollar they spend that each dollar of govt funding can. It's just not true, see health posts above.
Shipley doesn't even believe it. Elsewhere in the interview she talks about leadership and doing the right thing even if it's not popular.
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