David Seymour: Pharmac Minister on the decision to broaden access to type two diabetes medications

David Seymour says a decision to broaden diabetes medication met his expectations.  

Pharmac's widening access for several medicines for type two diabetes from September, helping to lower blood sugar and reduce kidney complications.  

The Associate Health Minister says more than 30 thousand people will benefit by removing ethnicity from the question.  

Seymour told Mike Hosking he wrote a letter to the board of what he expected. 

He says they need to be the best organisation in the world and forget embedding the Treaty. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Farmak expanding access to type two diabetes treatment for next month.
Eligibility for fore MEAD is going to be widened more
than thirty thousand people they think are expected to benefit
over the next five years. The access will be based
on clinical need, not ethnicity or other eligible criteria. Ovid
seymore as a co Associate Minister of Health, also the
administer in charge of fire making, is with us morning,
good morning. Are we getting more scripts here for more

(00:22):
money or the same amount to different people.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
There's going to be more people who are eligible because
previously you had to be either Mari or Pakiha sorry,
either Mari or Pacific, or have a diagnosis that made
you eligible for these medicines. From now, you're only going
to need to have elevated blood sugar. That means that

(00:48):
you have a risk of type two diabetes and therefore
you are eligible for one of these four medicines as
prescribed by your doctor. That means there will be more
people getting it, where we'll buy more of these medicines
and we will prescribe and doctors will prescribe. We will
supply more of the medicines if doctors prescribe them.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
Who decided that the board, the chief executive or you.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Not me, and not the chief executive. Ultimately the board
has to sign these things off. But FARMAC has a
number of what they call technical advisory committees, which have people,
as you'd expect to are experts in pharmacy, pharmacology, and
specialists from the different areas of medicine.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
Yeah, so they did that based on a change of
rules and understanding, though presumably didn't they.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
Well, this has happened because first of all, I have
appointed people to the board who are interested in having
the best medical medical assessment authority in the world, not
embedding the treaty. And second of all, I've written them

(02:00):
letters of expectation saying, you know, forget about embedding the tree.
That's not your job. There were no medicines around in
eighteen forty. Captain Hobson didn't promise this, And actually, what
you need to do is be the best medical technology
assessments organization in the world. Let's focus on that. A
combination of those letters and those appointments has ultimately led

(02:22):
to decisions like this. But I don't directly choose.

Speaker 1 (02:24):
No understarticular medicine. Those who still argue for the MARI
side of the equation based on the they are overly represented, which,
of course they are technically correct, they are overly represented.
Do you understand that to any degree or not? Really?

Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah, it's absolutely true. Ari and Pacific have a higher
portion of PREB pre diabetes, and as a result, more
Marian Pacific people will go to their doctor and be
assessed and they will get more of these medicines. That's
as it should be. But you don't need a different
criteria like we used to have, when it basically said

(03:02):
in order to qualify for this funding, you have to
have either Mari and Pacific ethnicity or an actual clinical
diagnosis that you need these medicines. And what we used
to have is people would go to their doctor and
they and the doctor would say, Gee, if you were
Mari or Pacific, we could give this to you for free,

(03:24):
but you're not, so you will either have to not
have the medicines or pay out a pocket. I met
one guy the doctor said, if you were Mari, this
would be free. Said glad you asked, because I actually am.
He wasn't, but it shows how ridiculous the situation was.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
So are you disappointed this week and what you've heard
from Treasury and MB and corrections in the massage that
maybe you collectively haven't made the dent in that sort
of philosophy that you might have wanted.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yes and no, I've always said to people, at the
end of the day, in an election, we campaigned to
expand our place in Parliament. That's why I asked people
to give the party vote to act that allows us
to form a government and control cabinet. But we are
part of this thing which includes sixty thousand public servants,
some of whom sometimes are nefarious, others just have an

(04:14):
ingrained worldview that is quite different from the rest of
New Zealand. And you only have to look at sixty
five percent of Wellington Central gave their party vote to
Labor or Green. Now that is very different from any
other part of New Zealand, not only on how far
left it is, but how different it is from the
rest of New Zealand. And that's obviously going to have

(04:37):
a factor. But the way I look at it, we
keep on fighting. We have a lot of successes. I
look at this. I went into Parliament in part to
fight racism and we have just removed racism from the
way that pre diabetic medicines are prescribed and funded, and
tomorrow we'll fight something else and we'll keep fighting and winning.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
All right, Just quickly the golp one debate on your
argument that if you spend up front to save long term,
when are we going to fund golp ones to twenty
five dollars a month like costco are in America, for example,
through insurance, so that you potentially solve one of the
great obesity dilemmas of the Western world.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
Well, there's there's a couple of things there. First of all,
co payments we haven't done, but we could do, and
that's something that I think is probably not going to
change in the next few months, but it's worth talking
about if we're in this position after the election. But
the bigger issue is just the sheer amount of money
in farmac. We have five percent of the health budget

(05:39):
in Australia. They're equivalent as they spend twelve percent of
all health spending on medicines. And with my act had on,
one of the things we're campaigning to do is say, look,
one percent of healthcare spending should go to medicines, ring
fence for medicines. You do that for seven years next
year at six percent. The year after that's thirty three,

(06:00):
We two will spend twelve percent of our health budget
on medicines without having to cut anything, because we're doing
it out of the growth that's already happening. And I
think if we were to do that, then the answer
to your question is yes, almost certainly, we would get
down the list and fun GLP ones, along with many other.

Speaker 1 (06:17):
Things interesting Good talk farm AC Minister or Associate Minister
of Health David Seymore in charge of farmak for more
from the Mic Asking Breakfast. Listen live to news talks.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
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