Health Minister Dr Shane Reti doubles-down on disastrous broken cancer drug promise
Health Minister Dr Shane Reti is sticking to his guns about funding the specific 13 cancer drugs promised on the election campaign.
That’s despite an author of the report the promise was based on saying the list is out of date.
The broken cancer drugs promise was front and centre of a grilling at Select Committee on Tuesday.
This is the anatomy of a broken promise.
“We do acknowledge we could have communicated this better,” Dr Reti admitted.
National promised to fund 13 cancer drugs on the election campaign and failed to deliver them in the Budget. It’s become a disaster for the Government.
Dr Reti told Newshub he did put in a formal Budget bid for the cancer drugs – but wouldn’t explain why it was declined, saying that was “confidential”.
Some problems with the policy include:
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- Pharmac is supposed to remain independent from Government so drug selection is not influenced by politicians
- Introducing 13 cancer treatments all at one time comes with major extra workforce demands
- The cost
- And while Pharmac has signed off seven of the drugs – one’s been declined, three still require assessment or clinical advice and no application has been lodged for the other two.
At the Select Committee today, Labour’s health spokesperson Dr Ayesha Verrall said Dr Reti had persisted with a “manipulative and cruel promise” he did not intend to follow through on.
Ministers are scrambling to find a workaround, but in public Dr Reti is doubling down – recommitting to the specific 13 drugs he promised.
“We are committed to delivering the cancer treatments as we described them,” he said.
The list came from the Cancer Control Agency report written back in 2021. Oncologist Dr Chris Jackson helped write the report and he said it was never designed as a shopping list.
“Taking a three-year-old list is just nuts,” he said.
Cancer treatments have since evolved and there are more effective drugs available – but even knowing that, Dr Reti is sticking to the specific 13.
“That’s the commitment that we made, and so that’s what we’re sticking to,” he told Newshub.
And he denied he was sticking to that commitment to win a political battle.
This goes from bad to worse.
Dr Shane Reti is a good man, but like Tama Potaka he is having to defend the indefensible.
He is doubling down on a list that is old and has been superseded by better cancer drugs but is dying in a ditch to fund them all.
National should never have promised these 13 drugs because the companies would immediately jack up prices.
It was going to cost $280million, it will now be twice that as National back down…
Up to 26 new cancer treatments will be funded alongside 28 other medicines as part of the Government’s $604 million health budget to honour a National pre-election promise.
However, National’s commitment to fund 13 specific cancer drugs hasn’t been fully met with up to seven listed in its 2023 policy included in today’s funding package with the others replaced by “alternatives just as good or better”, Health Minister Dr Shane Reti said.
…National are fulfilling half their promise for twice the cost!
What was worse was that National specifically circumvented the normal processes to make their false promise…
The Government has made its own problem with Pharmac – Steve Maharey
To recap. Pharmac was established in 1993 by National to buy pharmaceuticals(medicines). Anyone wanting Pharmac to buy a medicine makes an application. Pharmac then goes through a process (this is all on their website) of assessing the medicine then ranking it on an “options for funding” list.
Pharmac negotiates with the relevant pharmaceutical company and settles on a price. It works within a fixed budget, employs 150 people and gets advice from a network of some 400 hundred health professionals.
Because the fixed budget is never enough to buy all the medicines people want, Pharmac has attracted a lot of criticism. Its decisions are said to be too slow and lacking transparency, its staff are heartless – the list goes on. Any organisation can improve its performance (and Pharmac has) but the real problem for Pharmac has never been the way it operates. The problem is the level of funding.
This is where the current Government got itself into difficulty. It promised it would make fundamental changes to the way Pharmac operates.
…it was National Party incompetence as to why it has failed to deliver on its promise to cancer patients!
Cancer patients have been unnecessarily frightened by this initial call and now it will cost us twice the amount it was going to BECAUSE of National’s grandstanding.
If this is winning, I’d hate to see what losing looks like.
Well let’s start with some good news. PHARMAC has more money. That’s not a bad thing.
The bad news is this government is only responding, more than likely, because of some advice or polling that said their breaking of a promise was a disaster. They lied, they tried it on, and now they are back peddling. That’s vintage Luxon.
It wasn’t complicated at all. They clearly could have funded seven of them in the last budget.
Some more bad news. Some of the medicines are out of date. Hello! This is PHARMAC we are talking about. Osimertinib should have been funded ages ago, but PHARMAC essentially reference priced it against an older less effective molecule.
When this great call was made by National to fund more drugs I did wonder how you would find fault with the move .
I was not disappointed.
I think even supporters of National would accept they muffed in communication but for 175000 it is good news that this new government us supplying these drugs which were available to Labour to finance but they wanted to spend money on a phantom bike bridges and light rail.
You don’t have much of a clue do you Trevor. How could you possibly buy Luxon’s bullshit?
The polls show there are lots of people like me who are happy with this government. While I do not agree with all the moves that the 3 parties make it is better than the 6 years of Labour’s poor control. They did some thinks well but overall it was not a great act
What a liar Willis is .First she had no money for these drugs now she has 3 times more .Clearly she has just borrowed more or will cut school lunches all together to pay for it .Then there is the ferries no doubt her toyota ones will come in at 5 billion and be delivered in 10 years .
While it is good to fund some drugs I suspect that there will be some sort of rationing over who gets the drugs & who you know instead of your illness/need will probably be the determining factor.
Bonnie What is not good is Luxon actually promising pre-election, to fund certain cancer drugs, then going back on his word after he got the election. Reti’s saying that – in spite of having teams of communicators and advisors – they could have communicated better.
Luxon says that sort of thing too, eg when mindlessly trashing the previous government prior to his Japan trip, then saying that he could have said it better – or some such. The disconnect between what they say and what they do is patently too big, and it’s what they do which counts, not what they say they are going to do.
Yes, of course trained medical professionals should be determining medical treatment, and the notion of half-baked politicians doing so should be sending shivers up everyday people’s spines.
It takes a special type of incompetence to turn extensive funding into a disaster. Perhaps Cigareti needs a new job.
On the surface this looks like a win for people who need these cancer drugs however the money comes from next years budget. How many people will lose their jobs to fund these treatments and how many other people will miss out on other life saving drugs to belatedly fulfill this promise. The media should be all over this broken promise,they should be all over Simeon brown and Nicola Willis too for the utter shambles they have caused,the latter two refusing to front up about thre ferries and the pylon. We should be demanding resignations from these three because whether they like it or not the buck stops with them and where is the coward Winston peters who signed for the new ferries nowhere to be seen. Probably overseas offering our country to go to yet another war.
It is obviously an attempt to look as though this was going to always happen.
I’m surprised the media have not hammered the point that this is going to be funded by credit as the money is being allocated from next years budget.
No questions or indication of what is going to get chopped next year to pay for it.
Smoke and mirrors.
Funny how these things get glossed over.
Media are scared shitless because winny has threatened to shut them down so they wont say fuck all ,hence why I am baned from most news comment sites .Clearly they will scrap school lunches or winter heating payments to cover this shit .600 million is a lot of money to buy votes from people who may well have died before the next election
There are 147 medicines on that options for investment list and another 225 going through the process of application. In 2018 Pharmacs budget need a $2 billion boost now it is $3 billion more needed. Pharmac now needs a yearly budget of $4 billion .
Pharmac budget increases are going backwards not forwards.
They will call an election next year while these poor folk are still alive to vote for them .Cynical vote buying at its best
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