August 23, 2023
Cancer drug catch up falls short
An advocate for greater availability of medicines says the National’s promise to fund 13 cancer drugs highlights how far New Zealand is falling behind the rest of the world.
National says it will pay for the policy by reimposing prescription co-payments on everyone except community services card and gold card holders, bringing in $300 million over four years.
Malcolm Mulholland from Patient Voice Aotearoa says the 13 medicines are among more than 100 cancer treatments available in Australia but not here, and they’re on the World Health Organisation’s essential medicines list.
“These drugs have been sitting on Pharmac’s options for investment list for a number of years now. Most bowel cancer patients or whanau that have been affected with bowel cancer will be familiar with the drug cetuximab (Erbitux). The reason the WHO comes up with and essential medicines list is as a guide to developing or third world countries and we’ve sill got a long way to go before we fund all of those drugs,” he says.
Malcolm Mulholland says underfunding by successive Governments means Pharmac needs to more than double its annual budget of $1.3 billion to catch up with Australia, and the lack of modern medicines is imposing huge costs on the wider health system.