Roy Heather: General Debate 
Roy Heather: General Debate 
[Volume:630;Page:2080] 
HEATHER ROY (Deputy Leader—ACT) 
: 
 Last Wednesday was members’ day and my member’s bill to remove the exemption that Pharmac currently enjoys under Part 2 of the Commerce Act was narrowly defeated. Unfortunately New Zealand First members who over the last 6 years have complained terribly about what Pharmac is doing to the access to medications in this country saw fit to support the Government and prevent the bill from going to a select committee. 
Mark Blumsky 
: They are the Government. 
Paula Bennett 
: They are the Government now. 
HEATHER ROY 
: That is dead right. Since then we have had some toing and froing between the Researched Medicines Industry Association representing the pharmaceutical industry and Pharmac with regard to numbers. Since 1993 when Pharmac was first established New Zealand has progressively moved backwards in terms of the accessibility of pharmaceuticals for New Zealanders. Less and less choice has been available. 
Australia now has 729 chemical entities available on its pharmaceutical benefits schedule compared with 713 here in New Zealand and there is a total of 2500 products on Australia’s pharmaceutical benefits schedule but only 1815 here in New Zealand. Earlier this week Pharmac came out disputing those figures but further investigation showed that when it was counting—on its fingers and toes presumably—it was fudging the difference between non-medicines and medicines. When Pharmac put its figures out it included things like condoms bandages and peak flow meters—all of valuable assistance to people of course but not in fact medicines. So there was quite a lot of dishonesty in the figures that were being passed on to the Minister who then repeatedly stood up in the House during the week and said what a wonderful job we were doing in New Zealand. 
Pharmac produced a table which it has put on its website and it is very enlightening. It shows the difference in both the breadth and the choice of available funded drugs in each country. What the table does not show though and what is even more telling is the restricted access to medicines to new pharmaceuticals in New Zealand. 
What has been lost in this whole debate however about numbers of listed medicines and those medicines that are not available is the patients themselves and what they cannot get access to. A general practitioner I saw earlier this week gave me several very good examples of things he comes up against day upon day when patients are sitting in front of him in his surgery. The first example—and this is a terrible example of waste—is a patient with quite bad diabetes who requires an insulin pump. Because the general practitioner is not a specialist when he is prescribing the insulin to go in the insulin pump that the patient uses at home the general practitioner cannot prescribe the sort of insulin the patient actually needs because Pharmac rules prohibit that; he must prescribe two different sorts of insulin. The first is the sort that Pharmac says general practitioners because they are not specialists have to prescribe. So the patient goes to the pharmacist with his prescription picks up the two different sorts of insulin and throws the first one in the rubbish bin outside the pharmacy on his way out because it is totally useless to him. What a terrible waste that is! 
The second patient the general practitioner told me about is a young Maori man who like many young men of his age has acne. He has tried all sorts of treatments but nothing has worked and he requires a drug that specialists can prescribe freely but general practitioners have much more difficulty with because they are not dermatologists. Because the patient gets the medication from his general practitioner he has to pay $60 a month for it as the prescription attracts no subsidy when it is prescribed by a general practitioner. If the patient were to see a dermatologist he would pay only $5 for a month’s supply of the medicine. The difficulty though is that the patient cannot afford to see a dermatologist because that would cost $175. So he is stuck seeing the general practitioner and paying $60 as opposed to $5 a month. Again it is absolutely ridiculous. 
The third example concerns my own mother-in-law. She has lived a long hard fulfilling life but unfortunately in her old age she has started to develop symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Pharmac in its wisdom despite the fact that in other countries people have ready access to the cholinesterase inhibitors that are very successful in treating those symptoms—only about 30 percent of patients do not respond to such treatment in some way and 30 percent of patients who do respond get quite a significant reversal of their symptoms over a period of time—is denying patients good-quality treatment. 
The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.