Activist Solon Gets House Support for Health Probe

Bayan Muna Rep. Satur Ocampo delivered last Sept. 7 a privilege speech which, among others, assailed the “minuscule budget” for public health services. He has gained support on this from his colleagues.

BY ALEXANDER MARTIN REMOLLINO
Bulatlat

When Bayan Muna (BM or People First) Rep. Satur Ocampo delivered a privilege speech last Sept. 7 on the “deplorable condition” of the country’s public health sector, six of his colleagues immediately lined up to interpellate him. They even got into a brief argument on the sequencing.

It turned out that the interpellators – who included Emilio Macias II, a physician from Negros Oriental – had all taken the floor to express agreement with the activist congressman’s speech. Some of them, in the course of their interpellations, even lifted the lid on public health problems in their own districts.  

The atmosphere was decidedly different from that which surrounded the privilege speech of Zambales Rep. Milagros Magsaysay, which was followed by acrimonious, even below-the-belt debate.

“Minuscule budget”

Two days later, BM representatives filed House Resolution No. 226, calling for an inquiry into the deterioration of the country’s public health sector as a result of the “minuscule budget.” The resolution has 40 co-authors, Ocampo told Bulatlat in a phone interview. They include “all the ones who interpellated,” he added.

Ocampo had noted in his privilege speech that over the past eight years, government funding for health had decreased drastically.

In 1996, per capita spending on public health amounted to P230 ($8.85 based on the $1: P26 exchange rate then) a year.

For 2004, the health budget amounts to only P114 (P2.04 based on the current $1:P56 exchange rate) – or P0.32 ($0.0057) a day. “This amount is not even enough to buy a tablet of Biogesic, or its generic version, which costs P1,” Ocampo stressed.

He cited in his speech a few cases documented by the Alliance of Health Workers to underscore the state of the Philippine public health sector, among them the following:

Wyana Figueroa, in an article published in a daily, told of having seen a 19-year-old mother left to die in a government hospital. The young woman had lost a lot of blood in delivering her child, and had to have a life-support system attached to her. Because her parents were unable to pay the hospital bill, the hospital staff took out the life-support system: they would not be moved by her parents’ pleas. They even asked her parents to pay for the bed sheet and linens stained with her blood.

One patient of the National Kidney and Transplant Institute who was too poor to pay for the dialysis suffered complications. As she gasped for breath, she and her family pleaded with the hospital staff that she be given oxygen. The plea was ignored, and the patient died.

The eight-year-old child of a security guard was admitted to the Philippine Children’s Medical Center (PCMC) in Quezon City for bacterial meningitis. The family had to spend some P30,000 ($531.72) for the treatment, and the parents literally had to beg from politicians and charitable institutions to pay for the expenses.

Reduction trend

The trend toward reduction in Philippine public health expenditures had been noticed by the World Bank as early as 1999. A document at the World Bank’s website, dating back to that year, stated that inflation had “eroded the national health budget.”

Asked to comment on this, Ocampo said that this did not take into account the very orientation of the national budget. “It is the spending for essential public services which the government cuts down in dealing with inflation,” he said. “This is to avoid touching the budget allocations for debt servicing, which it considers the highest budgetary priority.”

 “Debt servicing is a major cause of the drying up of public funds,” the activist solon added.

As much as 49 percent of the annual Philippine national budget is taken up by allocations for debt servicing. The military gets as much as 21 percent of the budget pie.

Article XIII, Section 13 of the Philippine Constitution provides that: “The State shall adopt an integrated and comprehensive approach to health development which shall endeavor to make essential goods, health and other social services available to all the people at affordable cost. There shall be priority for the needs of the under-privileged, sick, elderly, disabled, women, and children. The State shall endeavor to provide free medical care to paupers.”

The World Bank provides the funds for the loans granted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF has been assailed by no less than Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, one of its former officials, for what he describes as “squeezing” poor countries dry to get debt payments.

The proposed National Expenditure Program for 2005 allocates P695 billion ($12.41 billion) for debt servicing, and only P10.3 billion ($183.93 million) for public health.

Rep. Eduardo Zialcita (Lakas-CMD, Parañaque City) has recently proposed the creation of a committee to audit the government debt, which has reached P3.35 trillion ($59.8 billion). In various venues, he has said that the audit should determine which of the country’s debts are onerous and which are fraudulent. The onerous and fraudulent ones, Zialcita says, should be repudiated, while the beneficial ones may be renegotiated.

“We are with him on that,” Ocampo said when asked about Bayan Muna’s position on Zialcita’s proposal. “Beyond that, we have filed House Bill No. 2496, which seeks to repeal the Automatic Appropriations Act.” Bulatlat

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