As some of you may know our oldest daughter has type one diabetes. In New Zealand pharmaceutical funding is done through a government agency called Pharmac. Basically this means that the government funds the medicine our daughter needs but they decided which ones they fund.
It has its upsides. Listed pharmaceuticals are cheap so everyone has access to insulin, but it also means that the government controls what we can get. For example until recently Lantus, a modern long acting insulin was virtually unavailable here. If a pharmaceutical is not listed it is very expensive to obtain privately because our market is very small.
Recently Pharmac has announced that it will only fund one type of glucose meters. Next to insulin this is the most important piece of kit for a type one. The new meters have not been used here for several years and are an inferior product. But it will save the government a lot of money, because it is not just type ones who use these meters but the growing number of type twos.
I have spent some time reading Pharmac consultation notes and my summary of the problems with the proposed meters are below. I have used the popular Accucheck meter as a comparison.















