Labour lies on health

Labour have been going on for months claiming that health funding has not grown to keep up with our population and inflation. They cite a figure of $1.7 billion of under funding on this basis.

I made the mistake of assuming their figure was correct, and not checking up on it previously. I just assumed someone else would have.

But as I had some spare time last weekend I went through the Vote Health expenditure for the last decade. I then got the CPI figures and the resident population figures. And put them into the table below.

So health funding has increased by 35% in nominal terms. In real terms it has gone up 20% since 2008 and even in real per capita terms it is up 8.3%.

That’s pretty good considering the GFC and the Christchurch earthquakes led to huge deficits, which the Government also had to close.