There’s good money in cancer, but this makes for bad politics. National’s pledge to fund 13 new cancer treatments was a foolish election promise, which it then failed to deliver in its first Budget. Now, the government is desperately trying to circumvent the normal drug-approval process while furious cancer patients and advocacy groups denounce it for betraying the dying. A sequence of poor political decisions is metastasising throughout an already sick coalition, and it will take deft political surgery to keep this government alive on the table.
The problem – as usual – is funding. For decades, the primary treatments in oncology were similar across cancer
