Associate Health Minister David Seymour. Photo: RNZ / Mark Papalii
The minister responsible for medicines has revealed he is pushing for hundreds of millions of dollars in additional drug funding in the next year's Budget.
Associate Health Minister David Seymour told Checkpoint he is concerned about the accessibility of medicines here.
Currently, he is gathering evidence to justify the higher spend.
A new report showed the medicine gap between Australia and New Zealand was getting wider and deeper.
Australia publicly funded 215 modern medicines since January 2011, compared to just 86 in New Zealand, according to research commissioned by Medicines New Zealand.
Australia is also funding them faster than New Zealand.
About 40 percent of the drugs publicly funded across the ditch, but not here, are cancer medicines.
Seymour said there is a justification for increasing the amount spent on drugs, and there needs to be a different approach assessing the cost benefits of drugs.
"We need to move from economising within a capped budget to optimising the use of medicines and medical technology within the New Zealand healthcare system.
"That means that if, for example, our medicine costs more, but people can return to work fast to pay more tax and require less treatment in hospitals, then we should be factoring that in and actually using that kind of information to justify higher spending."
As the minister responsible for Pharmac, the country's drug buying agency, Seymour said they were currently working to pitch this way of funding.
"Pharmac and the Ministry of Health are preparing just such a budget bid in order that we can justify to the rest of the government and the budgeting process a greater expenditure on medicines."
He said they were seeking to fund a large amount of additional medicines.
"We are going to seek hundreds of millions of additional medicines funding.
"Of course that is subject to the budget process, which I can't get ahead of or try to predetermine but we're certainly going to make a strong case that more medicines is good for patients and can be offset by other savings in the health system and the wider New Zealand economy."
Seymour was confident that his coalition partners were open to the concept.
"It's a lot like what Nicola Willis for example talks about in relation to social investment, spending now to reduce cost to the government in the future.
"New Zealand First campaigned in the election on uncapping the medicines budget, and I think they might have even said double it. So certainly there is openness to this kind of change within the coalition."
However, he said the government was under "enormous" pressure to balance its budget.
"It has to be viewed within that context and the fact that we've already had bigger upgrades for Pharmac funding under this than just about anything else the government's done, and certainly bigger than at any other time in the history of Pharmac."
Pharmac currently has over 110 applications on it's options for investments list, medications that are still be be funded.
Seymour said the current rate of invention of new medicines was "exponential".
"We have to make sure that when we spend a dollar, we are spending it to the absolute maximum benefit of the taxpayer and the patient."
Currently, the country spends 0.4 percent of its GDP on medicines compared to an average among other OECD countries of around 1.4 percent.
But Seymour said we are tracking well.
"You look at it in really broad terms, two years ago New Zealand was spending 0.3 percent of GDP on medicines that's now 0.4, so it's gone up about a third. I don't think there's many statistics in the New Zealand economy that have increased by a third in the last two years."
Australia currently spends about 0.7 percent of its GDP on medicines.
Medicines New Zealand chief executive Dr Graeme Jarvis described the gap in terms of medicine supply between New Zealand and Australia as "jaw-droppingly massive" and said things were not improving.
"Despite these recent increases in funding from the last two successive governments, the gap is actually getting worse not better and additionally New Zealanders are having to wait far longer than Australians to access a much smaller number of modern medicines."
But Seymour believes we aren't as far behind as it seems.
"Australia all along has been spending about 0.7 percent of GDP. So it started off 0.7 there versus 0.3 here. Now it's 0.7 plays 0.4, I would say that we are catching up."
Jarvis told Checkpoint there had been 30 years of under investment in medicines in New Zealand, with the country's investment one half to a third lower than comparative OECD partner nations such as Australia and the UK.
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