Make New Zealand Healthy Again

Not an original idea but a really, really important one

New Zealand is spending record sums on healthcare while growing sicker by the year. What if the real solution isn’t more hospitals and doctors — but fewer sick people?

As the old sage Confucius is supposed to have observed around 500 BC, “A healthy man wants a thousand things; a sick man wants only one.”

Two and a half millennia later, that observation feels uncomfortably current. We are living longer, but we are not necessarily living healthier. New Zealand’s average life expectancy has risen by roughly 18 years over the last century—from about 65 years in 1926 to around 83 today.

Yet a quarter of us now live with one or more chronic illnesses, a third of adults are obese, and around one in three of us will receive a cancer diagnosis in our lifetime.

Meanwhile, the cost of treating all this sickness is exploding. Vote Health was $9.7 billion in 2006, $17 billion in 2016, and is heading toward $33 billion in 2025–26. That is a tripling in just two decades, far outpacing inflation and population growth.

Yet we are told daily that the system is “in crisis.” Emergency departments operate at “Code Red.” Patients wait weeks to see a GP. Specialists and nurses burn out. No matter how much money we pour in, the pressure only increases.

The uncomfortable conclusion is obvious: we cannot treat our way out of this problem.

So what if we didn’t get so sick in the first place?

That is the simple, almost radical idea behind a new campaign calling itself “Make New Zealand Healthy Again.”

The slogan is borrowed — unapologetically — from Robert F. Kennedy Junior’s American campaign, but the message transcends politics. If a population eats better and moves more, it will suffer fewer chronic diseases, and the demand for medical services will stabilise or fall. Prevention is cheaper, kinder, and more humane than cure.

The organisers argue that our health system is fundamentally misaligned with modern disease. It manages sickness exceptionally well but does little to create health. That echoes something a Hawke’s Bay GP once told me during my talk radio days: “At medical school they teach you about anatomy and about disease. They don’t teach you about health.”

In plain language, we have built an impressive ambulance service at the bottom of the cliff but neglected to build a fence at the top.

Nutrition sits at the centre of this debate. “We are what we eat” is a cliché, but it is also biologically undeniable. Over recent decades, ultra-processed food has become cheaper, more accessible, and more aggressively marketed than whole food. Sugary drinks often cost less than milk or bottled water. Children are targeted by advertising for junk food in ways that would be illegal if the product were tobacco.

Then we act surprised when diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease, and obesity rates climb.

Physical inactivity is the other silent epidemic. We have engineered movement out of daily life. Children are driven to school, adults sit for eight hours at a desk, and leisure time is dominated by screens. Inactivity is now so normalised that we barely recognise it as a public health threat, despite evidence that it is one of the leading contributors to chronic disease.

This is not primarily a failure of doctors, nurses, or hospitals. They are dealing with the consequences. It is a failure of culture, policy, and incentives. Our system rewards treating illness, not preventing it.

A serious “Make New Zealand Healthy Again” agenda would involve uncomfortable but evidence-based measures. That includes the promotion of unrefined and unprocessed foods that sustain energy and protect long-term health like fresh vegetables and fruit, plant and animal protein products including meat and dairy and nuts, seeds and natural fats.

Conversely the intake of takeaway food and sugary drinks must be discouraged.

Making meaningful physical activity a core part of schooling rather than a dispensable extra is also key. And what if primary care funding was tied to prevention outcomes and not just prescription counts and referrals?

Every credible public health body agrees that diet, obesity, and physical inactivity are among the dominant drivers of modern disease. These are modifiable risks, not acts of God.

Then there is that sector of health care that the medical and pharmaceutical establishment is distinctly unenthusiastic about – the alternative providers and supplements industry. MNZHA believes that the population would be well served by a fully integrated system whereby patients can make their own treatment choice, and still be eligible for public funding.

We have built a 20th-century health system for acute infections and episodic illness, but our disease burden is now 21st-century and chronic. No amount of extra hospital funding will fix that mismatch.

Confucius understood something timeless. A healthy society wants many things: prosperity, culture, innovation, joy. A sick society wants only one thing: to be healthy again.

New Zealand is drifting toward the latter. We can keep building bigger ambulances at the bottom of the cliff. Or we can finally put up the fence at the top.

For more: MNZHA.NZ