A patient advocate feels "let down" by New Zealand and Health Minister Andrew Little following yesterday's Budget announcement which she says didn't have enough funding for drug-buying agency Pharmac.
People desperately waiting for life-saving or life-extending medication to be funded by the Government for years were left devastated by the announcement. Of the $4.7 billion the Government's pouring into health over the next four years, $200 million is being allocated to Pharmac.
Pharmac said it needed double the amount every year to fund 73 life-changing medicines.
Advocacy group Patient Voice Aotearoa’s Fiona Tolich has neuromuscular disorder Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), which causes weakness and wasting in muscles, and has been campaigning for the drug Spinraza to be funded for children with the rare disease.
While Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in her speech announcing the Budget that “no one is left behind,” Tolich told Breakfast “it’s a lie”.
“She’s lying while smiling and kids with SMA and those who have cancer or a chronic disease or a rare disease have been pushed out in a boat in choppy water and the boat is sinking and that will be death,” she said.
Patient Voice Aotearoa chairman Michael Mulholland, who has been advocating for patient rights since his wife Wiki was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer three years ago, said he was “devastated” by the Budget announcement.
“The memory that I will have are the texts and calls that I was getting from patients and their families up and down the country, not only from people who are still with us today but from widowers who were just saying, ‘Look, we had really thought that going into this, the Government had listened to our pleas, that they would value life and clearly, they haven’t,’” he said.
Malcolm Mulholland from Patient Voice of Aotearoa says today’s funding announcements represent a decrease in funding. (Source: Other)
Tolich said she hasn’t heard from the Government or Pharmac over the reason behind the lack of funding, saying, “All you hear is, ‘We hear you, we feel for you, we’re trying our best’ but there is nothing there”.
She called the $200 million figure, spread out over four years, a “kick in the guts”.
“All through Labour’s Facebook pages, they’re celebrating it with all the zeroes - they took $200 million in Pharmac savings from Pharmac and put it elsewhere in the health budget.
“All they’re doing is giving back what they took but in small increments so next year, $40 million - it’s not enough.”
“It’s a death warrant. If they can't escape New Zealand, they are stuck here and they will deteriorate or they will die.”
Health Minister Andrew Little yesterday said he did not “buy into emotional rhetoric” and the Government had significantly increased Pharmac’s funding in the time Labour has been in power.
Tolich said Little’s response was “just spin,” adding that she “honestly thought he had more of a heart than what he does”.
“I have met with him face-to-face, I have shown him pictures of dead children and I thought he had more of a heart - he’s just deceiving the public in my eyes by giving back what they’ve already taken and saying that they’ve increased the budget so significantly.
“What they’re not saying is that in that time, Pharmac’s remit has actually been expanded so that extra money, in some cases, is just to deliver on things that other parts of the DHB were delivering on."
She said the public should be "very worried - not only the sick community but the well community who are only a diagnosis away from being in the same situation".
"I just feel so let down by the country and I feel so let down by [Little], who’s worn both a justice and a health hat [as Justice Minister and Health Minister] and I’ve got no words.
"I actually just feel like New Zealand is just horrendous to its sick people.”
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