announced a pledge<\/a> to lift Pharmac’s budget to 12 percent of total health spend by 2033. It’s currently 4.9 percent.<\/p>\nSpeaking to Midday Report, Seymour acknowledged that would mean other areas of healthcare would miss out but said “nothing that currently exists will be cut”.<\/p>\n
He said the shift would bring about a more efficient and effective healthcare system.<\/p>\n
Seymour pointed to Pharmac’s funding of Trikafta for cystic fibrosis, saying lung transplants, which used to be common, were now “nearly unheard of”.<\/p>\n
“People have speculated if we were to fund… WeGovy and the like, then we would see, over a decade, less obesity, less diabetes, less kidney disease, less dialysis, less kidney transplants. All of that saves money.”<\/p>\n
Seymour said Pharmac deserved a share of the continued increase in health spending.<\/p>\n
“Pharmac has been punished because they are so tough on their budget. The rest of the healthcare system doesn’t do that, and they keep getting these increases.<\/p>\n
“If people are worried, oh, Pharmac will will take their foot off the throttle. When they were given $604 million extra after the 2024 Budget, they didn’t stop being hard-ass negotiators, I can assure you.”<\/p>\n
In the 2026 Budget, the health system received a $1.5 billion funding uplift, but Pharmac got just $13.5m.<\/p>\n
ACT’s costings projected that overall health spending would be between $33.4b and $36.6b in 2027\/28. Under its policy, that would put the medicines budget between $2b and $2.2b.<\/p>\n
By 2033\/34, Pharmac’s funding would be between $5.4b and $6.1b, out of a overall spend of $44.9b to $51b.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ACT leader David Seymour is promising no existing services would be cut under its election policy to shift…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":523488,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[134,527,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-545584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545584","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=545584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/523488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}