Well of course it is. Take any enterprise and give it to a government monopoly and then make everyone use it and what do you expect. No competition and tenured workers is a sure fire recipe for disaster. The tales of waste and abuse in ACC are legion. If only ten percent of them are true we are being taken for a ride.
My wife tripped over in the garden , fell and broke her wrist a few years ago. Painful and a bloody nuisance. A policeman (or my then 16 year old daughter) could have made the diagnosis without recourse to Dr Roentgren's invention but we repaired to the hospital in the approved fashion. We required some analgesia, an Xray, a reduction and another Xray. In that order. What we got was an ACC form upfront well before the analgesia. It was (is) a culture. The ACC came before common humanity. I was puzzled at the time that this domestic incident even came within ACC's purview. But it did and no further progress through the 'system' was possible until I had filled in the form. The patient couldn't do this because she had broken her wrist, remember. What would have happened if I had not been able to play scribe I shudder to think. I got the impression if had filled in the demographics along the lines of F. Christmas, North Pole we would have been OK but not filling it was a non starter. Having declined all financial recompense (my wife was not working for money at the time) I thought the matter closed.
About six weeks later we received a 'phone call at 1900hrs asking if ACC could provide any home help as they were sure the high dusting had been neglected for a while. Common courtesy precluded me from telling them to get some sexual gratification as they left the building. What are we doing employing someone on time and a half or double time phoning to offer services that people almost certainly don't need for starters? A trivial story but with absolute veracity. There are billions of other stories for which I cannot vouch for detailing even greater profligate waste of my money.
Billions. I am not the first to point out that billion is the new million. Numbers associated with anything financial these days are followed by a quantity of noughts I didn't know it was possible to put after anything. ACC apparently has liabilities in the $200 billion dollar range (that's $200,000,000,000.00 I think) but has assets only half that. You don't have to be Adam Smith to know that is not going to fly. We are then told 'If this was a normal business it would be bankrupt'. No shit, Sherlock. And here in lies the problem. Why is it not a normal business? That is what insurance is, a business. It is not a business because it has morphed into welfare agency. There are businesses milking it as the cash cow it has become. The physiotherapy industry is whining this morning because it can see the farmer opening the gate prior to the herd leaving the milking shed.
Those who oversaw the transformation of ACC from an insurer to a welfare bottomless pit, the previous Labour government, are crying foul as they would . David Parker is bleating that ACC is the best system in the world and should not be tampered with. Here is a prime example of someone so blinded by ideology that he cannot see that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Wake up, David, ACC is a lemon. It is a business basket case. The Goof whines that he thinks that the figures are being made to look worse than they really are and we are being 'softened up' for the privatisation of the Corporation.
Well Phil, I am as soft as the softest comfy cushion. I need no more tenderising. Just bloody do it. Give me some choice. The choice for starters as to which parts of my life I chose to insure. Everyone has to pay ACC levies for damned everything. A worker in a florist pays levies in case she is savaged by a geranium or inhales potting compost. A construction worker insuring against being sconed by a hod of bricks is fair enough but an accountant paying for protection against a calculator? If said number cruncher wants to keep the abacus at bay then let him chose to pay for it. Get over it Goof your compulsion, totalitarian way of leading our lives for us is over. It ended on the second Saturday of last November.
ACC is broken. Of course it is. To put Humpty back together again we need to make a bloody great omelette.
No comments:
Post a Comment