Congratulations to Maryann Pratt, CFP, on her white paper The Future of Private Health Insurance and the effect on Public HealthCare in New Zealand.

(You can download it in the new Good Returns Reseach Centre).

It's an impressive piece of work, and it deserves to be recognised — not just for Maryann, but as a template for what advisers writing on policy issues can achieve.

Advisers have a role in policy debates and it’s something I’d like to see more of! This is why:

• Highlighting the issues – our extreme rate of medical inflation, nearly doubling in a year, plus more than 80,000 people dropping major medical cover in 2025.
• Advancing a hypothesis: by describing the adverse selection spiral step by step, a major contributor to price rises.
• Comparison – of course I love a comparison. Seven countries, seven different policy approaches, each with described responses — including the UK's cautionary tale of a relief that failed. This is a useful contribution to the debate about tax rebates for medical insurance.
• There are counterarguments… covering "this just subsidises the wealthy" or "public health should come first" objections. Which is important.
• Actionable recommendations. Not exactly what I’d do – and maybe different to what you’d do, but worth reading.

Good on Philip Macalister for having a new section – research – which is specifically for work of this kind.

I hate to say ‘advisers should’ because so much of what follows is wrong. Advisers can run their practices however they like, and some will never write a white paper, and maybe they are running their business how they want to. But if you do think ‘should I write a white paper’ my answer is probably, yes, go ahead. Even if you never publish it, you will think more clearly about the issue, you will write something that at the very least challenges your own thinking, and may, possibly, do the same for someone else too.