Health bill for year nearly a billion

Press, 27 January 1979, Page 11

Health bill for year nearly a billion

Nearly SIOOOM will be spent by the Government on health care this year, but there are serious doubts that New Zealand is getting value for this huge expenditure, according to the president of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association (Mr K. Vincent). In a paper given at the fourty-ninth Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science Congress in Auckland, Mr Vincent said that a rigorous examination had to be made of all health-care aspects, including pharmaceutical benefits to ensure the wise and efficient use of health funds and ways of combating rising health costs. “The long-term trend of health expenditure growing faster than the gross national product, cannot continue," he said. Intense competition for each dollar of Government spending demanded a new accountability from all sectors of the health service. Against this background the pharmaceutical industry had become a target for political measures aimed at alleviating the explosion in health care costs, vir Vincent said. “But, far from being a significant contributor to that costs’ explosion, the pharmaceutical industry is an essential factor in its control,” he said. Modern medicines had enabled health administrators to cut out expensive facilities such as long-term hospital beds, replacing them with more productive facilities including short-term treatment facilities, he said. The average cost for each prescription in 197778 cost the Government slightly more than $4. while it cost $llO a day to keep a patient in hospital. “Yet no attempt has been made to demonstrate that the $572.2M of het Government expenditure on hospital services was spent as effectively and economically as the 597.7 M spent on pharmaceutical benefits,” he said.

The public was entitled to know how the Health Department set priorities for health expenditure, how the health budget

was established, and the details of benefit as well as costs. Mr Vincent said that although the pharmaceutical industry had not con-

studies, the Health Department and the industry should co-operate to examine the expenditure on pharmaceuticals in terms of benefits and