By: Barry Soper | Tuesday, May 15, 2012 7:11 AM

The health budget has always been the bane of Governments. No matter how much they spend on it, it's never enough.

It's like a great vortex, sucking in cash at a never ending rate. Trouble with health is that in most people's lives they have a bad bout of it at one time or another and they need medical treatment.

Not all that long ago the notion of having a vital organ or a joint replaced was seen as Frankensteinian. Now a kidney or even a heart transplant is pretty commonplace and hip replacements are run of the mill.

Trouble is they're expensive and someone has to pick up the tab and that someone is inevitably the taxpayer. That's why every Government that tackles the system in any meaningful way is caned, unless like Luigi Peters you make health care free for under six-year-olds. They're a bit like interest free student loans, sacred cows that would turn any Government who changes them into a pat!

So with that in mind the Beehive burglars are preparing for next week's Budget where they say health will be the big ticket item even though the ticket price here hasn't kept pace with other similar countries to ours. A recent survey shows we spent the second lowest amount of money out of the 12 countries put under the microscope, after Japan.

But isn't that a good thing, are our people more healthy than the other sickos around the world? Well for a start, even though we're getting older, we're not as aged as the other countries looked at. But on the other side of the coin we've got the second biggest number of fatties after the home of the fast food revolution, the United States.

And our drug buying agency Pharmac's the skinflint we always knew it to be, buying drugs at 30 percent lower than any other country.

And low cost is where the burglars want to keep it, expecting us to swallow a bitter sweet pill. Next year you'll be paying a couple of bucks more for a prescription item. But we're told we'll get more operations when we need them and if you get the big C you'll be attended to more quickly.      

It's called trying to keep ahead of the never ending game or in a sick economy like ours it's a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul and neither of them is particularly wealthy!

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