Mike's Minute: More money for Pharmac or better self-health management?

I read an article yesterday about how we need to play in dirt more. 

It's good for your health, that’s why you should “ground” yourself. Get your feet in the earth every day, it's good for your health. 

That’s why we love growing our own veggies. 1. They’re fresh and good for your health, 2. your hands are in the dirt. 

And 3. increasingly it is assessed that it’s the grains and greens that is the best thing you can do for your gut, and your gut is pretty much the key to everything. 

It's also a lot easier than finding $1.7 billion over 4 years, which is what David Seymour has had to do for Pharmac. 

Pharmac is modern medicine, and modern medicine is an expensive business, and that’s because we don’t take our health seriously enough and end up with the mess we have in health care. 

We have never been more unwell. In a world where some anyway have never been more well, while at the same time living in an age where new information, life extending, lifesaving information has never been more accessible. 

At the same time Seymour was offering $1.7 billion, another bloke was blowing up at the Health Minister, having been told he needs to wait a year for an op. 

All this is the end of the line stuff. And before you complain too loudly, no, some people don't get a choice. Medical carnage besets them through no fault of their own. 

But for most of us that isn't the case, it is generally the culmination and accumulation of lifestyle. A lifestyle of a western world that knows full well what it is doing to itself and yet would rather debate a Phamac budget, because that easier than changing the way we eat or live. 

Pharmac’s Combined Pharmaceutical Budget (CPB) will be $1.5 billion, which is $6 billon over four years - and the money announced yesterday, which is another 400 plus million every year over 4 years, is merely to top up the underfunding which Labour left behind. This doesn’t improve things; it holds the line. It avoids the cuts. 

And it doesn’t include all the stuff Pharamc and the various pressure and lobby groups around the country will tell you we should be funding but don’t, because we don’t have enough money. 

But then how much is enough? In a country of 5 million, when there are more cost-effective answers than big pharma, how much is enough? 

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