Minister not ruling out return of $5 prescriptions

The health minister is not ruling out a return of the $5 prescription co-payment in a matter of months.

Shane Reti said that while the timeframe was still being worked out, he was “encouraged by the IT component which looks like it is in place to make it easier for them to administer”.

National campaigned on reinstating $5 prescription fees as way of funding 13 new cancer treatments that are available in Australia but not New Zealand.

Reti was asked whether the co-payment would start on July 1. “That’s what we’re working through,” he said. “It’s just going to be dependent on a few more things I want to see if we can get in place or not.”

In February, a pharmacist body said the unclear timeline then was “already causing significant confusion”.

Reti met with the Pharmacy Guild on February 22.

On Tuesday in Parliament, he said he had not held any more discussions with pharmacists at that point, but did continue to receive emails from pharmacists over the co-payment.

He said factors included different pharmacies able to aggregate prescriptions, to make it easier to implement the $100 cap, which was in place previously. Pharmacists had raised concerns, describing the $100 cap as a manual process that could be quite time-consuming.

National’s health plan promised to allocate $280 million over four years to pay for 13 cancer therapies, with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon saying last August they thought it was “a better use of taxpayers’ money than paying $5 prescription fees for everyone”.

While the implementation of the cancer treatment policy would come at a later date, National in its plan listed 13 treatments the Cancer Control Agency had described as having substantial benefit in New Zealand.