Healthcare no money-making affair, says solon

Ang Nars party-list Rep. Leah Paquiz.. congress.gov.ph

MANILA, Philippines—Healthcare should focus primarily on providing the best kind of service to people, not on making money, according to party-list Rep. Leah Paquiz (Ang Nars), as she sought a House inquiry into government health policy that she said promoted healthcare marketization and privatization under the guise of reform.

Paquiz warned of a constitutional crisis should such a policy be pursued, “because (access) to health care services is the right of every Filipino as enshrined in our 1987 Constitution.”

“The delivery of health care services is imbued with public interest. The government should not and should never treat the delivery of health care services as a business,” Paquiz said in a privilege speech late Tuesday.

Paquiz deplored the privatization of health care services under the public-private partnerships that the government is pursuing with corporate interests.

She said the House investigation should ask the government—through an invitation to the Department of Health, the National Economic and Development Authority and other concerned agencies—to disclose the contracts through public-private partnership agreements covering some 36 state hospitals.

Paquiz noted that Health Secretary Enrique Ona has stated that several state hospitals like the Orthopaedic Center and the Dr. Fabella Memorial Medical Center were in line for modernization, not privatization.

But Paquiz said that this so-called modernization was no different from privatization. The privatization of health services takes many forms, such as focusing on making sure the hospital makes money, she said.

“It is an implicit element of health sector reform, which is underpinned by fiscal reform. Allocation of resources in line with government goals has meant that the interests of the finance and treasury departments are dominant. This has affected the health sector because the goals of the finance and treasury department will often not be those of the health department,” she said.

Paquiz warned that this could lead to a “distortion” of health care services. For instance, the focus would be on the quantity of patients treated or the reduction of costs of service delivery instead of the quality of the health care delivery, she said.

She said the public-private partnerships, outsourcing and contracting out of services such as facilities management, hospital management and clinical services are part of the process of privatization and marketization.

Paquiz also criticized the government’s decentralization policies where the management and funding of government hospitals have been devolved to the local government or the hospital and institutions.

The claim that this would benefit local people because it would give them greater control over decision-making is actually of no help when resources from the government are reduced and local officials have no new means of earning income to supplement the reduction, she said.

It only leads to a reduction in services, she said.

Privatization will also adversely impact health workers, because it could lead to reduction of labor-intensive activities such as health and social care to cut costs. As a result, there will be cuts in the labor force, reduced salaries, or poor working conditions, she said.