Pitched as slashing the wait for planned operations (hips, knees, cataracts) and getting more Kiwis treated faster.

The Policy: National Health Targets Policy — 2023 Election →

What it does:

• The push: an "Elective Boost" buying extra procedures (often via private hospitals), under a health target that by 2030, 95% of people get elective treatment within four months.

Who qualifies — and the immigration question:

• Publicly funded elective surgery is not open to everyone in the country. You must be a New Zealand citizen, a permanent resident, or hold a work visa valid for two or more years. Temporary visitors, students and short-term workers are not eligible and must pay for planned care themselves; accident treatment is covered for everyone by ACC, and Australian and UK visitors get only urgent care under reciprocal agreements (Immigration NZ, govt.nz).
• So the waiting lists are not driven by ineligible "walk-in" migrants getting free surgery — under the rules, they cannot. Migrants who do qualify are residents or settled workers who pay taxes here like everyone else. The evidence points the queue pressure at capacity and an ageing population, not at eligibility. Where has the growth come from? Elective surgery has risen about 5% a year over the past decade, driven mainly by the ageing population needing hip and knee replacements as osteoarthritis climbs after 60 — and the over-65 group is set to roughly double by 2038. Notably, the rate of increase has been lower for Māori (2.14%) than for other groups (4.22–5.62%) (surgery trend study).

Public vs private, and the real bottleneck:

• The Elective Boost works by buying capacity from private hospitals — itself a sign the public system alone cannot meet demand. The binding constraint is workforce and theatres: surgeons, anaesthetists and nurses. More could be done privately only if there were staff and operating theatres to do it.
• And the workforce leaks: NZ has the OECD's highest reliance on overseas-trained doctors (about 44%), needs roughly 300 more doctors a year just to replace those retiring or leaving (many to Australia), and locally-trained doctors are more likely to stay than imported ones (The Conversation). The fastest way to cut waitlists is to grow and keep the surgical workforce.

The result (in progress):

The Elective Boost added more than 16,000 extra procedures and beat its first target, with 21,000 more planned (Beehive). But the queues stayed bad: by early 2025 over 37,000 people had waited beyond the target for treatment and over 77,000 for a first specialist assessment; the share treated within four months slipped to about 61–62% (from 66% a year earlier), and Health NZ was to be audited over growing waits and unequal access (NZ Herald). Verdict: real extra operations, but demand is outrunning capacity — the lever is staffing and theatres, not, as is sometimes claimed, restricting eligible migrants who already meet residency and visa rules and pay tax.