Rx for next president: Rescue
mothers, assure healthcare

by JC Cordon

WHOEVER will be elected president might have to hurdle among many others, two big tasks in the area of healthcare – rescuing mothers from the throes of death at childbirth, and providing universal healthcare protection to all 90 million Filipinos.

These tasks may seem “mission impossible” projects all at once but are, according to former health secretary Alberto Romualdez, not exactly beyond solution.

The first, he says, is something that the new president should achieve anyway, or come close to achieving, by 2015, when the Philippine government will be measured against its commitments under the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

The second, he says, is a problem that requires more than just money, (but?) plain and simple political will.

Improving maternal health, or reducing the number of Filipino women dying from complications at childbirth, is the MDGs’ Goal No. 5.

Official statistics show “an atrocious state” of maternal health in the country, says Romualdez at a forum held last week on the latest survey on socio-economic conditions conducted by the Social Weather Stations.

The decline in number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births has slowed down, from 209 deaths in 1993 to 162 deaths in 2006. But under the MDGs, the Philippines has committed to reduce the ratio of maternal deaths to 52 per 100,000 live births by the year 2015.

Simply put, 3,000 Filipina mothers die every year due to birth-giving conditions. Either their constitution is already weak or the hospitals and health personnel attending to them lack the facilities to ensure their survival and that of their babies.

Yet the situation is not entirely hopeless, according to Romualdez. A strong family planning program that integrates maternal delivery at the ground level could be a first step, he says.

At the moment, he laments that political leaders have focused health interventions largely on conducting medical missions, building hospitals, and buying medicine and making it accessible price-wise to the public. “We have to politicize health but we have to change the way politicians look at health (issues).”

The Social Weather Stations survey showed that an overwhelming 78 percent of Filipinos think that insuring health must rank high on the agenda of the next president.

This indicates, in Romualdez’s view, that the new political administration that will take power on June 30, 2010 must “elevate the level of politicization of health from that of parochial self-interests and petty patronage to a national issue of common concern.”

In the survey commissioned by the Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Association of the Philippines (PHAP), 72 percent of the respondents have no health insurance coverage at all and thus incur “out-of-pocket expense” on medicine or medical check-ups.

In a similar survey done in 2005 Romualdez says only 49 percent of the respondents said they incurred out-of-pocket expense for their health-care needs.

In terms of health financing, he says that in 2005, the government only spent almost 25 centavos a day for the Filipinos’ health needs.

In 2010, the government allocated 28,686,083,000 for the Department of Health, or only 2 percent of the P1.3-trillion general appropriations act. The DOH budget this year redounds to a spending on health of 89 centavos per citizen a day on average.

While the government’s health spending seems bigger at face value, Romualdez rues that it remains sorely inadequate given the fact that “even the poor and near-poor shell out money (for health). It is only the rich that have full access to healthcare.”

Romualdez insists that universal healthcare is something that the next administration, if it wants to, may well afford to provide the citizens. “The government has to spend it (money) wisely, to source it to the people. It is possible to provide universal healthcare. Money is not the problem; it’s political will.”

Dr. Soe Nyunt-U, Country Representative in the Philippines of the World Health Organization, stresses the importance of health as an election issue amid clear indications that voters want the next president to deliver accessible health services and programs,.”The people want politicians to look at health reforms as one of the next administration’s priorities,” he says.

Elsewhere, Soe notes that some candidates are thrashed at the polls over healthcare concerns. “In other countries, sometimes you (candidates) can even lose because of health issues.” – PCIJ, April 2010