In this year’s budget, the Government said it has increased Pharmac's funding by 43 percent over the last 5 years.

To get that huge increase, the Government simply took money from the DHB Hospital Medicine budget and gave it to Pharmac, according to new data from NZIER.

The NZIER Principal Health Economist, Sarah Hogan, is among the people who have been looking into this.

"There has been a little bit of new money going into Pharmac to fund new medicines and other things that fall under the combined pharmaceutical budget, but most of the increase we've seen has been the transfer of medicines that were purchased by DHBs for use within hospitals."

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