It’s a Merry Christmas indeed at the Philippine Children’s Medical Center as it will get to keep the 3.7-hectare Quezon City property that has been the government hospital’s home for the last 34 years.
Under a deal earlier proposed at the Senate, the National Housing Authority (NHA) will convey the title for the property next year to the Department of Health (DOH), officials disclosed in a public hearing on Wednesday. The DOH will be shelling out P900 million for the land, of which P500 million is expected to be paid next year.
The move—which eliminated the grim prospect of PCMC being “evicted” from the property in Diliman—implements a 1992 land swap agreement between the two agencies, which the Department of Justice upheld in a recently issued legal opinion.
The agreement involves exchanging a DOH property in Sambag, Cebu province, with the NHA property in Quezon City which has been the hospital’s location since 1980.
Prior to this solution, the NHA earlier maintained that the PCMC must purchase the land for P1.1 billion for it to stay there, a condition that hospital officials likened to a virtual eviction notice for an institution that caters mainly to indigent patients.
NHA General Manager Chito Cruz and Acting Health Secretary Janette Garin affirmed the agreement Wednesday during a joint hearing of the Senate committee on health and demography and the committee on women, family relations and gender equality.
According to the two officials, they also agreed to apply the 2003 valuation of the Quezon City property and that the NHA will shoulder all the taxes entailed by the land transfer.
Garin, who thanked the senators for their help in coming up with the solution, described the development as a “timely Christmas gift to the PCMC.” The remark drew applause from the hospital’s doctors and other personnel present at the hearing.
According to the DOJ legal opinion, the deal has actually been consummated, especially with the transfer of the Sambag land to the NHA in 2003. The NHA has since been able to subdivide the Sambag property and distribute it to beneficiaries.
The DOJ opinion also voided the NHA’s sale of a portion of the 3.7-hectare property to the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS).
Cruz said the NHA agreed with the opinion and would cancel the sale of the portion to PIDS and return the payment.
The NHA general manager also requested that the land title to be given to the DOH contain an annotation that there is a remaining balance to be paid.
He also called on senators to provide the DOH with the P400 million it needed as part of its budget in 2016 to complete the payment for the land.
Sen. Paolo Benigno Aquino, who suggested in jest that perhaps the DOH could pay the P400-million balance in “10 gives (installments),” noted that PCMC was given a P1.22-billion budget for 2015.
Up to P500 million of that budget could go to the partial payment of the land to NHA, P400 million for upgrading the hospital building and P326 million for other expenses, including the purchase of new equipment and perhaps the construction of a new wing, Aquino said.
Asked of about the DOH spending plan for the hospital, Garin said department officials had decided to allocate most of the PCMC budget for “direct health care,” considering the big volume of patients it serves, including children with cancer.