adding some cautious caveats around the pledge<\/a>.<\/p>\nOn\u00a0Morning Report<\/i>, Labour’s Grant Robertson indicated the screening age would have to be lowered in stages.<\/p>\n
“The likes of myself, or Nicola if she got the chance to do it, then have to work to see how quickly we could expand it. You’d never do it all at once.”<\/p>\n
He said Labour had set aside $2.7 billion in funding to meet increasing cost pressures and that included health services.<\/p>\n
National has promised to announce its fiscal plan on Friday.<\/p>\n
But finance spokesperson Nicola Willis agreed that changing the bowel cancer screening age would likely have to be phased in.<\/p>\n
“We’re going to make sure we’ve got good buffers in our fiscal plan for the cost pressures and to allow for new initiatives in the future that we may not have anticipated yet that will become pressing needs”.<\/p>\n
Willis said to implement the promise National would have to consider additional treatment and drug costs, as well as workforce shortages.<\/p>\n
On whether the age would be lowered in National’s first four years in government – “we would want to examine that initially to look at what all of those implications were before we then funded anything in a future budget”, she said.<\/p>\n
Bowel Cancer New Zealand chair Stefan Corbett told\u00a0Checkpoint<\/i>\u00a0that New Zealand had the highest rate of bowel cancer in the world, with 1200 people dying every year, and that did not need to be the case.<\/p>\n
RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A bowel cancer charity expects the party that wins the election to move quickly to reduce the age of screening for the disease, after making promises to that effect. It was policy on the hoof when Chris Hipkins and Christopher Luxon both promised during\u00a0Wednesday night’s leaders’ debate\u00a0that they would lower the age for free bowel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":8041,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8040","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\/8040","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=8040"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8042,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8040\/revisions\/8042"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}