Labour has promised to make maternity scans free for every pregnant woman in New Zealand, the latest in a string of health pledges the party is rolling out as it tries to claw its way back into government at this year’s election. Leader Chris Hipkins and health spokesperson Dr Ayesha Verrall announced the policy on Tuesday, framing it as a fairness measure for families who are already stretched by the cost of having a baby.
At the moment a pregnancy scan can cost an expectant mother up to $90, and the price depends heavily on where she happens to live. Some scans are fully funded, but many women are billed a top-up fee by the private clinics that carry out the imaging, and that gap has quietly grown into a real barrier. Under Labour’s plan, any scan that a doctor or midwife judges to be medically necessary would be paid for by the state, with the cost added to a patient’s record after a referral from a health practitioner.
“Women and their families shouldn’t have to worry about money when it comes to making sure they and their babies are okay,” Hipkins said. Verrall, a former health minister, put the clinical case more bluntly, saying scans “pick up issues early, help families prepare for birth, and save lives.” You can read the full announcement on RNZ.
The scans would sit inside Labour’s wider “Medicard” idea, the centrepiece of its health offer this campaign. The Medicard would give every New Zealander three free GP visits a year and free cervical screening for women aged 25 to 69, and the maternity scans now bolt onto that package. Labour says the scan promise would cost about $28.6 million a year from July 2028, and that the money would come from the revenue raised by its proposed capital gains tax on profits from selling residential and commercial investment property.
Labour has also tried to head off the obvious practical objection, which is that you cannot offer free scans if there are not enough people to do them. The party says it would fund 24 extra paid trainee sonographer positions at Health New Zealand to cope with the expected jump in demand, with the salaries of those trainees covered from the agency’s existing baseline funding rather than new money. Sonographer shortages are already a sore point in the public system, and waiting times for non-urgent imaging have blown out in several regions.
The people who actually arrange these scans gave the idea a warm reception. Porirua midwife Jo Stuart told RNZ that access to scans was “a massive problem” and that the cost left midwives carrying an emotional load when deciding whether to send a woman who could not pay to hospital instead. “It weighs on our mind, because we know what the outcomes can be,” she said. Her colleague Tess Willis made the point that the squeeze is no longer confined to the poorest households. “It’s not just the people that were typically low income, it’s actually everyday people with two working parents,” she said.
That observation goes to the heart of why Labour thinks this is good politics as well as good policy. Maternity scans are one of those costs that lands on ordinary working families at exactly the moment their budgets are tightest, and a flat $90 fee bites a single-income household far harder than a wealthy one. By funding every clinically needed scan rather than means-testing the help, Labour is betting that middle New Zealand will see itself in the promise.
The coalition parties were quick to push back, and the line of attack was predictable. ACT leader David Seymour said the announcement was more of the same from an opposition writing cheques it would make taxpayers cash. In a release headed “Free never means free with Labour”, he said “Every single one of Labour’s promises of ‘free’ services will end up costing taxpayers.” The deeper fight is over the capital gains tax that is meant to pay for the scans and the rest of the Medicard, a tax National and ACT have vowed to oppose and which Labour has made the fiscal engine of nearly all its election spending.
That funding link matters, because it means the maternity scan promise is only as solid as Labour’s ability to win the argument over capital gains. Voters who like the idea of free scans but dislike a new tax on property are being asked to weigh the two together, and the government will spend the next five months trying to make sure they do. Labour, for its part, is betting that a concrete, easy to understand health benefit will sell a tax that has historically been a hard ask at the ballot box.
It is also the second health pledge in a week built around the Medicard, and the pattern is deliberate. Rather than promise one giant reform, Labour is dripping out individual, relatable services and attaching each to the same card and the same tax, building a picture of what a Labour health system would feel like in everyday life. The risk is that the total bill keeps climbing in voters’ minds even as each piece looks modest on its own.
With the election now roughly five months away, expect both blocs to keep fighting on health and the cost of living, the two issues polls suggest matter most to voters. If you want to see how your own priorities line up with what the parties are offering this year, you can work through them with our voting tool.
What do you make of free maternity scans, and of paying for them with a capital gains tax? Have you been stung by scan fees yourself? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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