Medsafe regulates medicines, what is effective, and Pharmac buys them, for the whole country.
Pharmac drives hard bargains with pharmaceutical companies. There is a lot of money to be made (even in a small market like New Zealand) if a medicine is -bought (read subsidised) by Pharmac.
The effective treatments are available. The highly experimental, might work, might not, might kill you, might make you sicker, might cure you medicines are held at bay by medsafe, and when approved are made affordable by Pharmac.
Of course Pharmac is under constant attack by the completely unethical pharmaceutical industry and equally unethical senior doctors - all hopelessly corrupted by the enormous sums at stake. Huge astroturfing campaigns exploiting ill people and their families. But the benefits are so huge that it has survived.
There is talk about extending the model to medical devices and consumables.
Appropriate regulation is absolutely needed because the incentives that drug companies and medical equipment manufacturers face are opposed to the incentives of the community.
Free markets, in this case, make people sick and impoverished.
>>Medsafe regulates medicines, what is effective, and Pharmac buys them, for the whole country
This is no different than what happens in the UK and you're gonna run into the same problems that the UK has where cutting edge treatments cost too much for the government healthcare program to cover them.
The problem in medicine is that innovation is too expensive, and too slow to rollout, and this applies just as much to New Zealand as anywhere else.
Cancer and heart disease should have been cured by now, considering the pace of innovation we know is possible.
>>medicines are held at bay by medsafe, and when approved are made affordable by Pharmac
You can't legislate affordable cutting edge treatments into being. Pharmaceuticals have to be incentivized to spend vast sums on developing them, and a mechanism needs to exist to select the best amongst those treatments for further development.
Evidently, that selection and resource allocation role is best left to consumers and their doctors, as opposed to one centralized body.
>>Appropriate regulation is absolutely needed because the incentives that drug companies and medical equipment manufacturers face are opposed to the incentives of the community.
Their incentives are to be selected by consumers, and the best way to do that in medicine, like any other industry, is to produce high quality products at low cost.
See the study on the positive effects of down-regulating medical devices, which are lower prices and greater safety.
>>Free markets, in this case, make people sick and impoverished.
Medsafe regulates medicines, what is effective, and Pharmac buys them, for the whole country.
Pharmac drives hard bargains with pharmaceutical companies. There is a lot of money to be made (even in a small market like New Zealand) if a medicine is -bought (read subsidised) by Pharmac.
The effective treatments are available. The highly experimental, might work, might not, might kill you, might make you sicker, might cure you medicines are held at bay by medsafe, and when approved are made affordable by Pharmac.
Of course Pharmac is under constant attack by the completely unethical pharmaceutical industry and equally unethical senior doctors - all hopelessly corrupted by the enormous sums at stake. Huge astroturfing campaigns exploiting ill people and their families. But the benefits are so huge that it has survived.
There is talk about extending the model to medical devices and consumables.
Appropriate regulation is absolutely needed because the incentives that drug companies and medical equipment manufacturers face are opposed to the incentives of the community.
Free markets, in this case, make people sick and impoverished.