A cancer patient says the prime minister will never know the reality of those relying on life-extending or life-saving cancer drugs.<\/p>\n
The government promised to fund 13 new cancer drugs at the election, but its promise was not fulfilled on Budget Day.<\/p>\n
Richard – who has bowel cancer – is now paying out nearly $50,000 of his own money to pay for a life-extending drug – one of those the pime minister had promised to fund.<\/p>\n
He told\u00a0Checkpoint\u00a0<\/i>the coalition government had prioritised potholes over patients<\/p>\n
“If I am on a hearse driving to the crematorium, at least there won’t be any potholes on the road.”<\/p>\n
The Auckland man said he had been forced to battle the bank to self-fund a targeted drug called Cetuximab, alongside state-funded chemotherapy.<\/p>\n
Cetuximab is not currently funded by drug agency Pharmac, but Richard’s oncologist told him the combination might give him a 50 percent chance of surviving five years.<\/p>\n
“They suggested that if I were to self-fund the targeted drug, which ironically is part of the National Party’s list of potentially funded drugs, then that would improve my life expectancy.”<\/p>\n
rnz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A cancer patient says the prime minister will never know the reality of those relying on life-extending or life-saving cancer drugs. The government promised to fund 13 new cancer drugs at the election, but its promise was not fulfilled on Budget Day. Richard – who has bowel cancer – is now paying out nearly $50,000 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":10213,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10212"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10214,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10212\/revisions\/10214"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}