KEY POINTS:
A lawyer for the Government's drug-buying agency, Pharmac, is expected to today confront a bid by the "Herceptin Heroines" to have the High Court overturn a decision not to fund their own cancer drug costs .
The lawyer, Rachael Brown, will respond to the women's claim that the wrong process was used when they were refused "exceptional circumstances" funding for Herceptin they bought privately after surgery for early stage breast cancer.
Some of the eight women paid up to $120,000 for full-year treatements with Herceptin, a drug targeted to HER2-type breast cancer, but other were not able to afford the full treatment.
They were told several times between March and May last year that Pharmac would not provide exceptional circumstances funding to retropectively pay for their Herceptin, and the women allege this was unfair.
Their barrister, Helen Cull, QC, also spent three days this week seeking a judicial review in the High Court at Wellington of Pharmac's decisions in 2006 to not fund Herceptin for early-stage cancer, and in 2007 to fund it for short treatments of nine weeks, at an annual cost of about $5 million.
Treatments over 12 months for the 350 women likely to be eligible each year would have cost about $30 million.
Pharmac's lead counsel on the case, Mike Colson, spent yesterday systematically working through records of most of the discussions and decisions made by the agency and its committees on Herceptin.
He disputed the women's claims that the decisions were pre-determined, or involved inadequate consultation and withholding of information from a committee of cancer specialists.
Mr Colson also told the court that Pharmac's original decision did not specifically reject 12-month treatments, and that its second key decision did not cover funding the women want withdrawn from a clinical trial of nine-week treatments.
The hearing before Justice Warwick Gendall continues.
- NZPA
