Mums leaving Wellington Hospital within six hours of producing could have earned a $100 grocery voucher – until Capital and Coast District Health Board, accused of being off its trolley and trying to bribe patients, went into rapid reverse and scrapped the idea.

It would have brought a whole new meaning to the term “check-out”.

But there’s tremendous scope for extending this concept to cover all sorts of ailments and injuries – and slash waiting lists.

Why should there even be the need for many people to enter hospital, let alone leave it, if we can bribe them to remain at home, just ill enough, without actually dying?

We could incentivise them to “pick up thy bed, and walk” by offering shopping vouchers in ascending values according to how sick they are – rather like the way ACC values a lost leg at, say, $10,000, but a missing pinky earns $10, including GST.

How about starting with $100 in food or holiday vouchers (with Fly Bye-Byes, of course) for every week someone needing a hernia operation elects to stay on the waiting list? It’s a lot cheaper than the $1500-odd it costs us to keep them in hospital for a night. And it would speed things up for the rest of the lame and infirm who already have enough food, or have just come back from holiday.

Properly handled, the revolutionary new GoG scheme could not only cut patient queues. It might even allow us to create hospital redundancies.

And it could benefit the humble GP.

Every surgery has its semi-resident hypochondriac or three. Some are almost professionally “sick”, keeping logbooks of their imaginary illnesses – rather like train-spotters – along with entire libraries of medical dictionaries, often marked up with diseases personally suffered.

But most of them are merely sad and lonely, and regularly turn up at the doctor’s just for a chat and a moan. For this, they’re usually rewarded with some harmless placebo or other, which does the trick until next Monday morning.

Why not, instead, save State funds on useless medicines and offer them a $25 voucher for a herbal remedy of their choice, just for turning up but not seeing the doc? Waiting times would be dramatically reduced and homeopathic health shop-owners would be ecstatic.

We could extend the idea to other well-being promotions, such as discounted sensible shoes from the chiropodist, or fruit, veg and toothpaste coupons from the dentist, cheap binoculars from the optician… the opportunities are endless.

This idea has legs! It might become so popular that District Health Boards could end up going into supermarket retailing, along with cheap petrol and public transport ticket sales. They could have a fancy slogan, such as “Everything we do, we do to save ourselves hassle.”

There’s only one potential drawback: if it really catches on, the healthy rest of us, seeing all this largesse being spread throughout the unhealthy, may begin to feel a little sick…