What budget coverage should do
It’s unavoidable that the government’s presentation of the Budget will try to make it look good, and the the various opposition replies will try to make it look bad. What journalists can do is translate some of it.
For example, the total health budget is going up $2.2 billion over four years. It’s hard to interpret that, because there are at least four trends involved
- Dollars are getting smaller
- The population is getting larger
- The average age is increasing
- There are exciting and overpriced new medications available
It should be fairly easy to say whether the increase in the health budget keeps up with 1 and 2. That gives some idea of how much real per capita increase there is to keep up with 3, and whether extra money allocated for 4 will have to compete with what the budget currently buys.
Media organisations should have someone who can look at 1 and 2, and major media organisations should have been able to get an expert opinion of how big 3 is going to be.
Whether real age-adjusted per-capita NZ health expenditure should be stable, increasing, or decreasing is a policy question that we elect representatives to answer. Whether it is stable, increasing, or decreasing is the sort of fact question that we underpay the media to check for us.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »