He is fed up with what he describes as Health Minister Tony Ryall being " hellbent on going back to the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff stuff".
While increasing access to elective surgery was important for people, it should not be at the expense of the primary health care strategy.
Concentrating spending on surgery would be more expensive in the long run, he said.
He is concerned Mr Ryall wants to introduce changes to Primary Health Organisations when such groups were only just starting to get traction.
It was always envisaged that the primary health care strategy, with its emphasis on disease prevention, would take time to show results and there would be a period of inertia while it bedded in, but this was being seen as the system not working, he said.
Mr Dalziel, who is the chairman of the Otago Southern Region PHO, but was speaking personally, said people like him were belittled in comments from a speech by Mr Ryall earlier in the year in which he claimed some boards were paying directors $800 to attend a meeting.
He said all the people on his board received $250 a meeting, including the doctors.
The amount of work involved at each meeting would be around eight hours, which meant all were being paid little more than $30 an hour.
"No-one wants to waste health dollars."
For many of the years he had promoted rural health issues, it had cost him moneyMr Dalziel said PHOs were more closely collaborating and there could be more of that, but planners should " think again" if they wanted to combine rural and city organisations.
"They will have a fight on their hands."
Responding to Mr Dalziel's comments in a written statement, Mr Ryall did not directly address the rural issue, but said taxpayers put more than $30 million into management and administration of the country's 80 PHOs.
That was too much, and more should be going into front-line services.
"It is crazy that 30% of the population are covered by four PHOs, while 12% of the population are covered by 41 PHOs."
Mr Ryall said there had been nine years of huge investment in preventive programmes, but there were still tens of thousands of people waiting for hospital operations.
Voters had made it clear they were fed up with long waits for surgery, cancer treatment, and emergency treatment and that was why the Government was focusing initially on improving those areas.
A ministerial reference group led by Dr Murray Horn is looking at community health care and is expected to report to the Government at the end of this month.
Mr Ryall has said the group's recommendations are expected to show how the primary health care strategy can be delivered in a " high-trust, low bureaucracy way".
