Thursday, 20 May 2021, 2:37 pm
Announcement in the budget today of $200 million over the
next four years is simply meeting the Government s election
2020 promise for funding existing medicines and some new
ones. It does nothing to solve the medicines access crisis
or medicines inequity issues for Māori and Pacific peoples,
and simply confirms information already leaked to the media
earlier this week.
While New Zealand’s total health
budget has increased with a big investment to overcome the
COVID-19 and DHB funding issues, the medicines budget has
not kept up with population growth and inflation since 2007
and is still in crisis. Evidence for this came from a recent