{"id":544151,"date":"2026-07-26T01:20:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T01:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/544151\/"},"modified":"2026-07-26T01:20:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T01:20:11","slug":"act-campaigns-to-close-the-pharmac-funding-gap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/544151\/","title":{"rendered":"ACT campaigns to close the Pharmac funding gap"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ACT Party is proposing to increase the proportion of health budget spent on Pharmac by one percent a year, to bring New Zealand in line with Australia and closer to the OECD average.<\/p>\n

The policy would see Pharmac’s budget rise to 12 percent of the total health spend by 2033.<\/p>\n

Currently, New Zealand spends 4.9 percent of the health budget on medicines, well below the OECD average of 13.3 percent.<\/p>\n

ACT leader David Seymour, who currently holds ministerial responsibility for Pharmac, told RNZ he had spent the last three years in government trying to increase Pharmac’s budget.<\/p>\n

“Pharmac is punished for being tougher on its costs than anyone else in the healthcare system. We need to give them a break.”<\/p>\n

The uplift, he said, would enable Pharmac to fund more medicines on its Options for Investment list.<\/p>\n

There were currently 139 applications on the wishlist, which are all pharmaceuticals Pharmac would fund if it had the money to.<\/p>\n

Dozens of modern medicines languish on Pharmac’s drug wish list for years<\/a>Pharmac’s wishlist of drugs could increase four-fold in next two years – advocate<\/a><\/p>\n

In the 2026 Budget, the health system received<\/a> a $1.5 billion funding uplift, but Seymour said Pharmac got just $13.5 million.<\/p>\n

He was hoping for cross-party support for the policy.<\/p>\n

“It is actually an achievable, realistic, and timely way to approach a problem that everyone admits, but no one has ever quite got on top of.”<\/p>\n

Despite being the minister, he had not pitched the idea to his coalition partners.<\/p>\n

“I have asked for more modest increases in medicines funding, which have been rejected. The logic that I’m producing now, I believe, is unassailable as a way of persuading anyone who’s in government – and let’s be really honest, between now and 2033 there’ll probably be several different people in government – this is a logic that anyone can sign up to.”<\/p>\n

Seymour said he was proud of the work he had done with Pharmac and MedSafe to get more medicines, but it had only gone so far.<\/p>\n

“You could see this as a final jigsaw piece in the work that I’ve done over the last three years.”<\/p>\n

David Seymour wants Pharmac to use AI to speed medicine funding<\/a><\/p>\n

At the lower end of ACT’s costings, it used the Treasury’s 2025 Long-term Fiscal Model, while at the upper end it applied the Treasury’s 2025 Overlapping Generations model’s projected health-spending share to nominal GDP forecasts and projections.<\/p>\n

This meant in 2027\/28, overall health spending would be between $33.4 billion and $36.6 billion. With the medicines share increasing from 5 percent to 6 percent, it would put medicine expenditure between $2 billion and $2.2 billion.<\/p>\n

By 2033\/34, with a projected health expenditure of $44.9 billion to $51 billion, and a 12 percent medicines share, medicine expenditure would be between $5.4 billion and $6.1 billion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The ACT Party is proposing to increase the proportion of health budget spent on Pharmac by one percent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544152,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-544151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}