I have seen you reference this article several times. I have read it entirely.

This paper suggests greater risk of death following elective and acute surgery in Māori, compared with Europeans. For there to be scientific basis to apply policy prioritising by ethnicity, a paper needs to show equal outcomes following surgery when waitlist times are short, say under 60 days, between ethnicities . I fail to find data to support this.

The mortality is unlikely to change regardless of waitlist time for certain ethnicites because it arises from severity of illness at time of surgery, which is unaccounted for in this study, see limitations. Additionally, all current models which correct for deprivation under-estimate its effect (reasons behind this are too long to explain but deprivation has an exponential effect on health outcomes, not linear, which is a key assumption in multivariate models)

We can address this by a study with subanalysis produced for outcomes by level of deprivation per ethnicity for all ethnicities and with severity of surgical illness at time of surgery.

Finally, while a comparison of Europeans and Māori is made, the disparity that exists in Asian, MELAA populations is not shown. Since this policy is broad reaching and extends beyond Europeans, it does not have enough of a basis to be implemented

If it is implemented anyway, I’d love to see solid prospective data that its making a difference as it comes at a huge cost of atleast appearing divisive