PRESS
RELEASE
30
July, 2008
ING fulfils
first insurance claim for Herceptin treatment
As
pressure continues to mount on PHARMAC to fund a twelve month course of
Herceptin treatment,
ING
today announced that it has accepted and is fulfilling its first claim for
Herceptin,* a targeted
therapy for HER2 positive breast
cancer.
The claimant, a self-employed
woman in her 50s based in Auckland, had no history of breast
cancer
in
her family but specifically took out medical cover with ING because of the
company’s policy of
covering non-PHARMAC funded
treatments, including the full year course of Herceptin.
Herceptin is currently funded
by PHARMAC for a nine week treatment course for HER2 positive
early
breast cancer. However, despite much
lobbying from the New Zealand public and medical
profession, PHARMAC currently does
not provide funding for a full twelve month course of
Herceptin.
In
many other developed countries, Herceptin has been approved and is fully funded
for the treatment
of
HER2 positive breast cancer for up to twelve months.
Naomi Ballantyne, Managing Director,
ING Life (NZ) Limited, said, “A twelve month course of
Herceptin can cost upwards of
$70,000 for the drugs alone, and this is on top of the costs
associated
with administering the drugs. Add to
this the costs associated with surgery, chemotherapy,
radiotherapy and all the other
treatments that go alongside fighting cancer and the sums start
to
mount up”.
“Although much of the treatment
regime for breast cancer will be covered under the public
system,
health insurance is there to fund
the gap between what the public system can provide and what
is
available privately. For ING, this
means providing funding and access to a full year’s course of
Herceptin and access to instant,
private medical care. If you are diagnosed with the specific form
of
breast cancer that Herceptin treats,
you want to know that you are doing everything possible to fight
it
and this means being able to access the best drugs and treatments available without having to wait.”
Although Herceptin funding in New
Zealand has received a great deal of media attention over
recent
years, there are thousands of
treatments approved by Medsafe in New Zealand that are not
fully
funded by PHARMAC. ING is the only
insurance company in New Zealand that includes cover of
non-PHARMAC funded, but Medsafe
approved, treatments as a standard part of its major medical
cover.
Ballantyne continued “New Zealand
offers a world-class healthcare system but in many cases the
public system has long waiting
lists. Additionally, although the limited funding of Herceptin in
New
Zealand has received a great deal of
attention during the past few years, there are thousands of
other
treatments that are approved by
Medsafe but that are not funded by PHARMAC. In many cases
this
lack of funding results in these
treatments being available only to those who can afford them.
For
those individuals that find
themselves unable to access specific medical treatments because of a
lack
of
cash-flow, it can be devastating”.
“I
believe that people should have insurance cover for those events they can’t plan
for and that will
place a major drain on a person’s
financial resource. ING’s whole premise when it comes to our
insurance products is to ensure that
we are doing right by our customers and then we work
backwards from there. This means
providing our members with the cover they would expect. It is
more likely that a customer of ING
will get a claim payment with us, because our products do
exactly
what our customers need them to do.”
Further information on ING’s
insurance products can be found at: www.ingnz.com.