It was revealed on the AM show that Mike King apologized for being rabidly critical of the government last week after it refused to help fund Gumboot Friday counselling sessions. King admitted he had been up the night before the interview supporting a young person in hospital who had attempted suicide.
True to form, Ardern’s plan to handle the overloaded mental health services is no plan at all but a whine about needing more time.
“[Gumboot Friday is] providing essentially the kind of mental health we try and provide through our public health system but it uses the private system to try and reduce down wait times.”
The reason taxpayers pay for private health insurance is to avoid waiting for healthcare, for instance, up to a year for a colonoscopy which could be the difference between surviving or dying from bowel cancer.
Tapping into private health services props up the underfunded public services. In Auckland, private hospitals now carry a percentage of public patients to ease the overloaded public health system. Birthcare is another example of the creep of public health into the private arena.
Using the private to prop up the public health system is a double whammy for taxpayers and Ardern is all for hitting taxpayers in the pocket twice while at the same time criticising Mike King’s Gumboot Friday.
“… how do you make sure that you are still providing those people who are on existing wait lists the care they need when we’ve got this separate mechanism.”
Mike King clearly cares about teenagers committing suicide when they aren’t getting the counselling they need. In contrast, Ardern’s socialist brain appears more concerned about equity.
“If we create a whole separate system, how do we make sure everyone gets equitable care?”
Someone should ask that exact same question of her about her government’s plans for a separate Maori health system. Where will be the equity of care for non-Maori who don’t get their own special health system?

Hospitals triage people coming into emergency hospital rooms for good reason, and the same thing could be done with our mental health services. Equitable care indeed! Some people are more desperate than others, which is exactly why King set up Gumboot Friday to save youth who are falling through the cracks in the current system.
“Currently people who are going through Gumboot Friday and accessing private care… there’s no necessarily guaranteed that they get all the care they need for the length of time. It runs out.”
AM Show
So now it’s a competition between which services are better, public or private? But wait there’s more.
Ardern then did a U-turn by saying her people are still talking to Mike King’s people when they were doing no such thing last week.
When Duncan Garner pressed the PM on whether she wants to use Mike King’s services she said:
“I think we need to clear out wait lists.”
“I am clear on this; we need to clear out wait lists but it does nothing for the people who are currently on our public [wait lists].”
And
“We are still talking to them [Gumboot Friday]”.
Liar. A slick little lie, but a lie nonetheless.
Ardern’s people were not talking to Mike’s people last week because King was very angry precisely because Ardern’s people had dismissed his funding request out of hand.
Ardern is conflicted. On the one hand, she wants the government to control all health services, including privately funded services, but on the other hand, using Gumboot Friday is an admission the public mental health system has gone tragically backwards under her watch.
Ardern said she wants to spend a lot more time solving the lack of mental health services regardless of the fact that additional time is what some mental health patients don’t have.
Anyway, the taxpayers won’t mind another delay, will they? With the exception of Mike King, nobody else is complaining. Shane Reti should stir his stumps and bring this debate into the house where it belongs.
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