Bumrungrad International, the same company that runs the famed Bumrungrad Hospital in Thailand, since 2005 already purchased a controlling interest of 40-percent share of Asian Hospital.
Health officials claim that medical tourism could also alleviate the mass migration of health professionals as the demand for high paying jobs would surge in.
However, these have yet to be seen. In the meantime, hospitals around the country still suffer from lack of doctors and nurses. The Alliance of Health Workers (AHW) says that the government should start addressing the reason health professionals leave – low salary, poor working conditions and lack of job security.
Fundamentally wrong
There is something fundamentally wrong when a government starts offering “world-class” healthcare to foreign clients when it cannot even guarantee health for its people. In fact, more than 60 percent of Filipinos do not have access to primary health care and the leading causes of death are mostly treatable and preventable diseases.
Globalized health care
Under MTP, foreigners will be provided quality health care, while poor Filipino patients are likely to be neglected further. Priority will be given to these foreign patients with money to pay and thus services for charity patients will be decreased significantly.
At the Philippine Heart Center alone, an indigent patient wanting to undergo a heart transplant would have to wait for a grueling six months before he or she can be operated on. In the National Kidney and Transplant Institute, there is a heavy backlog of patients.
The full-scale implementation of MTP is seen to lead to the eventual foreign ownerships of hospitals and most segments of medical services in the country. The present moves of the Arroyo government to overhaul the Constitution would hasten such development.
Medical tourism is but one form of globalization of health care – foreign doctors, foreign owned hospitals and medical facilities catering to foreign clients: a sell-out of the country’s health care system to foreign big business that spells government abandonment of its responsibility to provide much needed health services to the people. Contributed to (Bulatlat.com)
