This story annoys me more than a little.
Health Minister Tony Ryall said the “inequitable geographic provision” of the surgery was concerning.
Well, this is hardly the only surgery that’s targeted. Premature birth? You’ll fly to the nearest regional centre for care. We don’t have surgeons and nurse specialists in every hospital in the country. Seriously ill child? Move to Auckland, because they’ll be going to Starship. There is a never-ending list of procedures you won’t get in Patea, or Hawera, or New Plymouth, or even Hamilton. Unless the health budget is infinite, or unless fat advocacy has gained enough clout we’ll start running down other medical care options to fund it, obesity surgery is no different. Perhaps that’s where the money saved by slashing mental heath services, in a country that traditionally tops lists for suicides, will end up; unless Ryall’s ministerial wishes are backed by increased funding.
“It’s terrifying that I’ve got a life expectancy of five years.”
The Whanganui woman, who has been morbidly obese since she was 16, has been told she will be dead by 30 without bariatric surgery.
That is fucking terrifying. I guess that’s why:
In February last year the minister stood alongside Health Minister Tony Ryall as they announced that the Government was removing the healthy-food requirement for school tuckshops. The policy had been put in place by Labour and required schools to sell healthy foods and limit the sale of the likes of donuts, sausage rolls and meat pies.
I guess Tony can work out how to make DHBs spend more on morbidly obese 25 year olds, but he’s unalterably opposed to doing anything useful about it when they’re teenagers.
She said she could move to the catchment in Counties-Manukau. “But that’s a huge thing – to leave all the support of my family and friends – and not to mention costly, for only a possible `maybe’.”
At this point I’m afraid I lost all fucking sympathy. If my daughter got sick enough to need care only available in the Starship catchment area and I refused to move to get her treated, would we get loving newspaper articles about hard done by we were? Would we fuck. We’d be vilified for being unwilling to endure a little hardship to save our daughter’s life, and rightly so. And if you aren’t willing to move cities to have a shot at saving your own life, well, that says it all, really.
