$140 million for an unachievable system

Radio NZ reports:

A project to replace a system that dishes out $12 billion of health payments every year is in trouble.

Health NZ / Te Whatu Ora’s health sector agreements and payments system was rated three years ago in danger of complete failure. But three years on it has spent $85m only for the replacement project to appear to be “unachievable”, a newly released Treasury paper prepared in March shows.

By then, the $116m budget approved in 2021 had already expanded to $140m, with officials warning: “Successful delivery (to the approvals in the last Cabinet approved business case) appears to be unachievable. There are major issues which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable.

Think how many nurses or doctors that money could have hired!