There has been increasing concern about the availability of publicly funded medicines here compared with other countries such as Australia.
Successive governments have not provided enough money for us to keep up, leaving the drug-buying agency with an impossibly long wish list.
With the ongoing avalanche of new medicines, it seemed New Zealand was set to fall further behind.
The extra money will allow Pharmac to fund up to 26 extra cancer treatments and 28 other medicines.
It is great news, but in the words of the old politically incorrect saying, it ain’t over until the fat lady sings.
At this stage, she has hardly begun warming up her vocal cords. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has been keen to emphasise how transformative this will be and to ignore the shambles preceding the announcement.
But there is much we still do not know about the implementation of the new pledge.
Those patients and their families who were expecting the government to proceed with the introduction of the 13 named cancer drugs in National’s election-year promise from the start of July do not know how long they may still have to wait.
Some of the newly funded cancer treatments will be available from October-November this year with more phased in over the next year. Oral medicines are likely to be introduced first.
Will all of those people still have lives to extend when the medications finally come on stream?
Oncologist Prof Chris Jackson has pointed out the potential for the introduction of the new drugs to cause major capacity issues, leading to huge waiting lists.
Delivering both intravenous and oral treatments requires oncologist supervision and monitoring. Also, the medications require specialised storage systems, extra scans will be needed for monitoring, and more nursing support will be required.
Do we know how many extra infusion chairs will be needed, and whether existing oncology units have space for them?
How much this might all cost and how easy it might be to find extra oncologists and nurses has not been detailed. Before the announcement, there were already concerns about Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora’s (HNZ) commitment to oncologist recruitment and its vague responses to media questions about that.
So far, $38m has been set aside for implementation although an unspecified but "generous" amount, according to the PM, will be available for HNZ and Pharmac to draw on in future.
The economic impact of the new funding, which is coming out of next year’s Budget, is also unclear. Mr Luxon has said it will be covered from savings in government spending, but we do not know what might be cut as a result.
Mr Luxon has been tetchy about criticism of the tortuous route to Monday’s announcement, only prepared to acknowledge what was being planned could have been explained better, rather than accept it was poorly conceived.
He admitted the idea had been to work outside the Pharmac system, but when National came to government it became "pretty obvious we’ve got a good model" (referring to Pharmac).
We are not sure why that was a revelation. If National had made the $604m Pharmac promise on the campaign, and begun implementing it as soon as possible, it could have saved itself and many cancer patients a lot of grief.
Prof Jackson says there is the opportunity for transformation of the way cancer medicines are delivered, which would be "awesome", but that would be lost if it was handled in a cack-handed way. As much transparency as possible from HNZ and Pharmac about what is planned will be essential.
