Following on from yesterday’s post Matt McCarten makes a strange comparison between Labour’s blast-from-the past policy of power price control and Pharmac: At home, the parallel in the health sector is Pharmac, which uses its buying monopoly to negotiate prices with multinational drug companies. It saves us billions of dollars. I haven’t heard the Government [...]

Audrey Young reports that the government say they will not scrap Pharmac as part of a free-trade deal with the US. Actually, National is being quite a bit more cagey than that. Tony Ryall is simply not commenting and Tim Groser is being positively vague as this shows: He said Pharmac was an outstandingly successful [...]

I see an number of doctors are voicing their concerns of the government interest in a Pharmac-like organisation to take over hospital based purchases. Not without good reason, I might add. The Pharmac model has a major flaw. That flaw is that the model is based on the free availability of cheap “equivalents”. There is [...]

Pharmac is almost universally hated by GPs. The incomprehensible funding decisions. The endless “special authorities” designed only to stop you prescribing a drug. The sudden unexpected loss of control of a patient’s disease because of a change to a cheaper brand. The dwindling choice of drugs which becomes horribly apparent when you try to prescribe [...]

There is good and bad in the news that Pharmac is to morph into a single purchasing point for all medicine and health technology. The Good Technology purchases will be co-ordinated across the country, meaning that a doctor can move from one hospital to another without having to learn how all the gadgets that have [...]

I see Labour is bellyaching about the proposed new National Health Board again. Labour’s health spokeswoman, Ruth Dyson, said Mr Ryall had already make up his mind about the future direction of health services. “This is more about Mr Ryall trying to impose his own vision for health than about a genuine attempt to make [...]

One of the biggest shocks to my system when emigrating to New Zealand was the severity of restrictions on GP prescribing. It was as if Pharmac did not consider them to be real doctors. For instance, when I arrived in 1995, GPs could not prescribe Prozac without a specialist’s permission. I had been prescribing it [...]

The Government has made good on its promise to fully fund the year-long course of Herceptin. And about time, too. Ruth Dyson sets the record for the most disingenuous comment of the day. The Government had set a dangerous precedent by overruling medical experts. Balderdash, Ruth. Did you really think that National made this decision by sucking it [...]

Pharmac finally gave approval for the use of a combination of drugs that preserve kidney function in diabetes last week – four years after it’s worth was confirmed by a large clinical trial. As Auckland diabetes physician Dr. Paul Drury says: Potentially, there are 100 people out there in end-stage renal failure who could have been [...]

Having finished with the head-to-head comparisons, National has one part of it’s health policy left – it’s medicines policy. Pharmac is the government department that doctors love to hate. We scratch our heads over the ramblings of the Ministry of Health and complain bitterly about directives from our DHBs, but Pharmac are the people with [...]