\nThe roll out plan would start around October or November this year, he said.<\/div>\n
But he said the final choice to choose what drugs would be funded would be up to Pharmac and its clinical teams.<\/p>\n
The money for the treatments would be coming from a pre-commitment to Budget 2025, Reti said.<\/p>\n
“There will still be funds for [Budget 2025]. But what we’ve also talked about is an ongoing desire across all of government, including health, to continue to strive for efficiency.<\/p>\n
“We actually don’t need cuts to cover it, because this is a pre commitment to [Budget 2025], but hand in hand [we] will continue to look for savings as every ministry is through the health portfolio.”<\/p>\n
Reti said the reason why the government was not able to announce the funding on Budget Day this year was due to the implementation stage taking longer than the government anticipated.<\/p>\n
“It was tricky to calculate well if we bring this up, which medicines could come forward first, which ones would actually need IV infusions. Do we have enough seats? Do we have enough chemo nurses? That was where we needed to get this absolutely right and have the right figure,” he said.<\/p>\n
He said he did not think the government’s announcement on Budget Day was a mistake.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think it’s a mistake for New Zealanders to have improved health outcomes and better cancer management. Could we have been more clear in our communications? Yes, of course and we would do that differently.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
rnz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The health minister is defending the government’s approach to funding cancer drugs after initially not delivering on its promise on Budget Day. The National Party promised to\u00a0fund 13 different cancer treatments\u00a0on the campaign trail in 2023, but the election pledge was\u00a0left out of the Budget\u00a0in May, leaving\u00a0cancer patients devastated. But on Monday, the coalition government […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":10465,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10464","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\/10464","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=10464"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10466,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10464\/revisions\/10466"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}