Abstract:
In 2005 New Zealand’s Pharmac was required to decide whether to extend public funding of Herceptin for use in early breast cancer. The Herceptin case was the most high-profile, difficult and divisive in the agency’s history. Its decision was marked by patient lobbying, intense media pressure, public sympathy for the patients, and the first ever successful patient legal challenge to a Pharmac funding decision. The case became an election issue, culminating in Government overriding Pharmac's funding decision. This article analyses Pharmac and its decision-making processes generally and in the Herceptin case, and considers the context in which this highly controversial funding decision was made. It analsyes the litigation, and discusses some features and implications of the episode, in particular for Pharmac’s legitimacy and the integrity of New Zealand’s explicit priority-setting process for medicines.