November 21, 2019
United front on drug buying gaps
An advocate for the funding of medicines for late stage cancers says if the government were to properly fund its drug buying agency Pharmac, a lot of the pressure over specific drugs would go away.
Malcolm Mulholland from Patient Voice Aotearoa were in Wellington to help hand over eight petitions asking for funding for drugs to treat conditions from cancer to type 2 diabetes.
He says looking over the spectrum of drugs Pharmac doesn’t fund, it’s clear Māori are left worse off.
“Our people simply cannot access these medicines and what often happens is it falls to families or whānau to be able to self fund and a lot of our people just can’t do that so what we see are lives being cut short and also the quality of life being a lot poorer for a lot of our people and that is simply not okay,” Mr Mulholland says.
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