Questions remain over when free prescriptions will end
Questions remain over when free prescriptions will end and the Government will return the $5 co-payment.
Health Minister Shane Reti wants to bring back the co-payment “as soon as we can”, but a pharmacist body says the unclear timeline is “already causing significant confusion”.
When asked in February whether the co-payment could be back from July, Reti told Stuff they were “certainly looking” as to how they could implement the co-payment, but there was still some IT work to be done.
“We'll give them plenty of time ... we'll flag that early as to when we'll be making that call.”
When asked if six months was “plenty of time”, Reti said that was still to be determined. “We need ... some IT parts, we're trying to make it easy for them when we do pull this lever so they'll have plenty of time.”
That IT system would make it easier for pharmacists to identify who had a Community Services Card.
Independent Community Pharmacy Group and Prescription Access Initiative spokesperson Gemma Perry said pharmacists had not been officially told when the co-payment would be coming back.
“It's absolutely not good enough. Pharmacies need lots of notice, but patients do as well. It's already causing significant confusion because patients are not sure whether they are paying or they’re not, or when is it coming back.”
Perry said they did not know what to tell patients when they asked, “should I be budgeting ahead for when the prescription fees come back?”, or “I don't want to have to change pharmacies again, back to a discounted to access free scripts”.
“We’re already in a massive workforce crisis in pharmacy, in all of healthcare, and we need to plan for that.”
Perry said the free fee had been a huge benefit for pharmacies, with pharmacists able to put the time saved “straight back into services like vaccination, and other primary healthcare measures”.
“It's a significant undertaking and we've already flagged this is not a good use of our clinical time. It's going to add a real significant administration step onto every interaction and every all patients are going to pay the price for that because of the time lost out of the system.”
The previous Government’s last Budget scrapped the $5 co-payment for prescriptions, expected to cost $618 million over four years.
Community Services Cards were a key part of National’s plan, which promised to return the $5 co-payment up to $100 a year and target the scheme, meaning SuperGold and Community Service Card holders would still have free prescriptions.
Pharmacists previously raised concerns over the proposal, describing the $100 cap as a manual process that could be quite time-strenuous, and for Community Service Card holders, at times it could take five to 10 minutes to ring a call centre to check a person’s card.
National’s plan promised to allocate $280m to pay for 13 cancer therapies, with leader Christopher Luxon saying last August they thought it was “a better use of taxpayers’ money than paying $5 prescription fees for everyone, including those who can afford to pay it themselves”.
Reti said the cancer treatment funding would take longer as they had to wait for the savings made from the prescription co-payment.
“I'm hopeful this year that we will return the co-pay and then the cancer medicines, when the funding is achieved, will start to roll out.”
Newsable spoke to professor of cancer medicine Dr Chris Jackson, who said the Government would need to review which drugs it chose to fund, as things had changed since an initial report he helped write picked the 13. He also said funding drugs alone wouldn’t be enough.
“We’re already in a massive workforce crisis in pharmacy, in all of healthcare, and we need to plan for that.”
Gemma Perry