MacDoctor Counterpunch

Cockroaches Scuttling for Cover

We read MacDoctor's blog regularly. Today he counter-punches the ACC for its deceptive and misleading commentary to a parliamentary select committee. ACC, of course, is the government's monopoly insurance provider for victims of accidents. We remind everyone, particularly overseas readers, that New Zealand's Accident Compensation Corporation it a statutory insurance monopoly that exacts taxes from every New Zealander, primarily through the employer, to fund a no-fault accident compensation scheme. Since it has no competition to keep it honest, ACC is an incompetent, bureaucratic morass.

Now, to be fair, some of this decrepitude is not of ACC's making. The previous left-wing Labour government sought to transform the ACC into a social welfare arm of the state, greatly expanding the range of "coverage" or conditions under which someone could claim ACC payment for medical treatment. This was in response to rising public health care costs. To try to cut costs in vote Health, the "robbing Peter to pay Paul" Labour government decided to shift some liabilities to ACC, which has a capital investment fund, built up over years, to fund long-tail insurance claims. Never trust a socialist when other people's money is lying around.  (We do hope our readers in the US are paying attention to this. This is where a public, taxpayer funded health system inevitably leads. Oh, sorry. We recall that the US federal government has already raided and expropriated--err, "borrowed"--Medicare and Medicaid funds for ongoing operational government expenditures. Too late.)

In any event, like all socialist schemes, eventually other people's money runs out. Suddenly, under the economic downturn and recession (in New Zealand we have had a double dipper) the (new, less socialist) government has run out of money and had to start borrowing. Suddenly cutting costs became flavour of the month in government circles--including at the ACC.

As part of the drive to cut costs, ACC started refusing legitimate (lawful) claims. It discovered a new reason for refusal: "degeneration", otherwise known as aging. If not aging, it is a condition where, as a result of an injury, secondary complications emerge. Imagine an accident that smashes a hip. The accident results in a pronounced limp which does further (maybe spinal) damage to the patient. ACC has started to argue that the further damage is a result of degeneration, and not from the original accident. Result: no funding. Bad luck buddy. Enjoy your life of pain. Now, remember that this is health insurance which the patient has involuntarily paid for through the taxation system. Suddenly the state insurance company is acting like a nasty private insurance company. But in this case it is made worse because there is no competition allowed for ACC  to help keep it honest.

Well the ACC hierarchy were before its supervising parliamentary committee yesterday and were asked to explain why their rates of refusal due to "degeneration" had risen. Their lame explanation: medical specialists had increased their rates of referral to ACC for funding. Those nasty doctors were making claims they knew would never be approved. Thus speaketh the bureaucrat--who congenitally does not know the meaning of "the buck stops here". Like cockroaches scuttling for cover, they were.

MacDoctor slams this egregious canard for all that its worth, which, to be sure, is substantially less than a brass razoo.