Health care blues

Do the poor get sick more often than the rich? Do the poor require hospital care more often than the rich? Malnourished and living in packed neighborhoods with pretty bad sanitary conditions, the poor are more likely to need more health care to keep them going.

- BOO CHANCO

The petition before the Supreme Court questioning the transfer of PhilHealth funds to the Treasury to fund pork barrel projects of legislators cited a significant disparity between the utilization of hospital benefits by the poorest quintile of Filipinos (1.5 percent or 346,800 Filipinos) and the wealthiest quintile (2.4 percent or 554,880 Filipinos) despite the poor having a larger population.

Given that the rich are not more likely to become sick than the poor, the petition noted, a possible explanation for this gap includes what we call pagtitiis, or "enduring the illness" and forgoing medical care due to a lack of financial resources, or seeking medical care but lacking the financial resources to be treated for their illnesses.

The poor and their basic health needs are not important for our presidents, senators, and congressmen. When the health care gap couldn't be ignored, the Universal Health Care Act was passed; targets were made to roll it out to benefit as many Filipinos as quickly as possible.

But as the SC petition pointed out, "for the first three years of the law's implementation, the funding for UHCA was way below the target budget of the first year of the implementation, making it undeniably underfunded..."

The UHCA provides for a ten-year timeline to implement the law. At present, we are in the fifth year of the UHCA's implementation and still have not met the law's objectives. Nor has the law met even its slightest promises which should have been achieved in the early years of the law's implementation.

The law says "Within two years from the effectivity of this Act, PhilHealth shall implement a comprehensive outpatient benefit, including outpatient drug benefit and emergency medical services..."