Ortho center being crippled
Last Nov. 29, 2011, the Inquirer ran a news article (“MPIC eyes gov’t orthopedic center”) which reported that business mogul Manny Pangilinan was interested in acquiring the Philippine Orthopedic Center because Metro Pacific “seeks to groom the Philippine Orthopedic Center as the premier center for bone diseases, trauma, rehabilitation and commercial production of limb prosthesis.”
Now it’s getting clearer by the day that our hospital, the Philippine Orthopedic Center, the premier and only musculo-skeletal and rehabilitation hospital in the Philippines, will also be privatized. Under the public-private partnership program, Department of Health-controlled hospitals are up for grabs to private investors. Once privatized, these supposed centers of wellness and health for Filipinos will be transformed into private milking cows of big businesses. Hospitals then would be like shopping malls where penniless citizens cannot afford a pricey commodity: health care.
Our clients are 95 percent classified indigent patients coming from various provinces nationwide. Let me add that our hospital is also the unofficial hospital for poor workers, many of whom suffer industrial-related admissions—from broken bones due to a fall from high-rise constructions, to mangled limbs due to machine malfunctions.
We are a poor man’s hospital. I must admit that we may not have the best smelling restrooms, but we have one of the most dedicated groups of health workers—despite the meager government support we are getting. We have managed to help a lot of people recover even when our budget has been dismally small for the past five years.
I am as baffled as everyone else why in the world President Aquino and Health Secretary Enrique Ona would want it privatized. The only thing I can associate with the word privatization is profit. Why would the government want to profit from the misery, ill-health and disfiguration of its own people? Isn’t health a basic right associated with the right to life itself?
The government should infuse more funds to health care service and health care human resource. It should stop pushing hospitals to be “financially autonomous” because a service institution that deals with the lives and health of Filipinos should not be likened to a sari-sari store. Hospitals are more like a family where the services of kin are rendered out of love, not motivated by profits.
Please don’t cripple the Philippine Orthopedic Center through privatization and neglect.
—SEAN HERBERT VELCHEZ, RN, president, National Orthopedic Hospital
Workers Union-Alliance of Health Workers, Philippine Orthopedic Center, Banawe, Quezon City
