Concerns over how long medicine funding applications take to be processed by Pharmac.
A new report found it takes an average of nearly eight years to be funded here, with a six-year average wait time for applications on the Options for Investment list.
It also found more than 60 percent of medicines were known to be publicly funded in at least five other countries.
Medicines New Zealand chief executive Graeme Jarvis says decades of underinvestment in healthcare is partly to blame.
"That's particularly true for medicines where in fact, it hasn't been even keeping up with population growth or inflation. So it's actually been negative, the level of investment over a decade and half's period."
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