WELLINGTON, June 24 — The Accident Compensation Corporation is telling New Zealand its long recovery crisis is over. But the number it is using to prove that point might not mean what people think. The ACC exists to mend people.
If you are hurt in an accident, the scheme pays for your care and some of your lost wages. In return, you give up the right to sue.
The money was never the point. The point is to get you better and back to the job and life you had before. So you would expect the ACC to check whether the people it pays for actually recover and go back to work.
It does. Sort of.
The corporation stops your weekly payments and then lets five weeks of silence pass. It does not ring your employer. It does not ask whether you have a job to go to.
On the ACC’s books, the day the money stops is the day you officially got better.
A flawed measure
That might sound like harmless paperwork. It is not. The ACC is now leaning on that very number to tell the country its long crisis is over.
For about a decade, the scheme drifted. People took longer to recover.
More of them got stuck on long-term support for sprains and broken bones that ought to heal. The future cost of all those open injuries roughly doubled. The long-term pool had been swelling by nearly 15% a year.
By April this year, that growth had stopped dead. The Government acted, and fairly.
It ordered a review, installed a new chair and made the ACC report its numbers every month. Good on everyone involved for getting that far.
Goodhart’s warning
The economist Charles Goodhart gave his name to a warning that fits the ACC’s return-to-work figure exactly. Once a measure becomes a target everyone is judged by, it stops reflecting the truth. Because the figure treats the end of a payment as a return to work, it can be improved by ending more payments.
The ACC cut or declined support nearly 173,000 times in the past year. What this means for families is the real question.
The human side of the statistic — the person whose payments stop but who still cannot go back to their job — does not show up in the official numbers. For patients recovering from accidents, the gap between what the ACC measures and what actually happens matters. The scheme was built to get people better.
If the measure meant to track that goal no longer reflects reality, then the good news the ACC is sharing may not be as good as it sounds.
