The policy would see Pharmac’s budget rise to 12% of the total health spend by 2033.<\/p>\n
Currently, New Zealand spends 4.9% of the health budget on medicines, well below the OECD average of 13.3%.<\/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
![\"File](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/lozenges-generic-istock-36WLZQ6STBFY3PD5VWYJH7FBUM.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
File photo. (Source: istock.com)<\/p>\n
In the 2026 Budget, the health system received 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<\/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% to 6%, 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% 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 1% a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544337,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[28921,134,111,43,139,69,135],"class_list":["post-544336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-act-party","tag-health","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544336","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=544336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544336\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}