Health Ministry, President’s Office silent on unkept promises for cancer medicine state-financing

The Health Ministry and the Office of the President of Malta refused to respond to The Shift’s questions about the government’s failure to add more types of cancer medicine to the government’s formulary, which would relieve the Malta Community Chest Fund (MCCF) of the financial burden of paying for potentially life-saving medication.

In November 2024, Health Minister Jo Etienne Abela claimed that the ministry would take over responsibility for the financing and procurement of cancer medicine. The MCCF is chaired by President Myriam Spiteri Debono.

Currently, patients who need this medication need to apply through the MCCF, which in turn spends most of its annual budget to pay for this type of treatment, which is often very expensive.

While the MCCF does have its own independent fundraising efforts, a big chunk of its budget comes from the government’s coffers anyway, making the whole process unnecessarily burdensome on patients who are generally in a vulnerable position.

Health Minister  Jo Etienne Abela had claimed that the handover process would be concluded in 12 months, but no public announcements have been made since the self-imposed deadline was quietly ignored towards the end of last year.

An informed source who reached out to The Shift explained that presently, the Government Formulary List Advisory Committee (GFLAC), which is responsible for maintaining the list of medicines that would be provided to patients directly by the government, is faced with a huge backlog.

“This means that patients end up applying to the Exceptional Medicines Treatment Committee as a shortcut, which results in a huge rate of refusals. Those who are rejected then end up at the MCCF. The problem lies in the inertia at the GFLAC within the Directorate for Pharmaceutical Affairs,” the source added.

According to the latest OECD report about Maltese people’s access to healthcare, people in Malta are subjected to ‘Out-Of-Pocket’ (OOP) spending twice as much as the EU average, in spite of the fact that the country has a free public healthcare system.

While patients and medical professionals alike carry the heavy burdens of an underfunded system that is unable to keep up with demand, the Health Minister commissioned yet another master plan for the redevelopment of two public hospitals which were effectively left to rot for over a decade as a result of the fraudulent public-private concession involving Steward Healthcare.