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Major parties promise shelter from diabetes tsunami
In early September, we held our Diabetes Matters Forum in Auckland, where the Health spokespeople from National, Labour, and the Greens participated in a panel discussion on how New Zealand can turn the tide on the diabetes epidemic.
With Guyon Espiner moderating the evening, National’s Dr Shane Reti, the Greens’ Ricardo Menédez March, and Labour’s Michael Wood all fielded questions from a crowd consisting of clinicians, people with diabetes, as well as parents of children with diabetes.
Members of the audience asked all three politicians what they would do to support the near 300,000 people in New Zealand estimated to have diabetes.
Particular pressure came on why CGMs are not funded. A common experience of parents was shared – having to spend $100 a week on a monitor for their child.
Diabetes NZ CEO Heather Verry said she and her organisation had been ‘shoved off’ by the government over the past six years and wanted to know why Pharmac’s funding model couldn’t take future savings into account.
Reti and Menédez March had an opportunity to share what their parties would do if they led the government. Wood, however, was in the difficult position of defending Labour’s performance while also promising it would do better, as well as defending the role of Pharmac.
‘This is one of the wicked problems that we face in our roles… there’s always a situation where we often know that there are things that we can invest in that will have positive long-term impacts, and if you are just looking at it through a fiscal lens will pay off – but you’ve still got to pay for it now … set against all of the other things that are coming through as priorities.’
Reti said specific health targets would be revealed in the following week. He said the projected rise of diabetes in New Zealand was like an oncoming tsunami that we were not prepared for. His main solution was fixing gaps in diabetes-focused workers in the workforce, but he didn’t provide a clear answer on how a National-led government would do this. He said datagathering needed to be bolstered to make sure targets were accurate.
Menédez March emphasised the inequitable social landscape that had led to New Zealand’s high level of diabetes. ‘This is a disease of poverty, and particularly relative poverty and inequality in developed nations, and so I think we need to make sure that any work to develop better datagathering doesn’t slow down the work we know we have to do.’ He said the problem wasn’t going anywhere without proper funding of core public services, and he took the debate back to the Greens’ star policy this election – tax reform.
All three spokespeople found areas to agree as well as disagree on.
On the taxing of sugary drinks, all three agreed there were better, more targeted measures to employ or said their policy work hadn’t been done. They again agreed there were barriers to access at the primary healthcare level, and there was no disagreement on the gravity of the problem.
For Dr Rosemary Hall, however, there wasn’t much to get excited about. She said responses from all three seemed cagey and ultimately failed to deal with the issue of stigma. ‘You can call people up and raise money for cancer,’ she said. ‘But just try that with diabetes and people will say, “oh well, they should just get off the couch”.
‘It’s that kind of public perception’, she said, ‘that’s made it hard for people to speak up and agitate for increased funding … It’s not a sexy illness.’ And in a system where the squeaky wheel gets the grease, she fears the problem of diabetes is not being addressed.
Michael Wood agreed, saying, ‘you don’t treat people’s illnesses with a veil of moral judgement’.
Source: Matthew Scott, Newsroom
Watch the Diabetes Matters Forum on the Diabetes NZ YouTube channel
