Press Release
July 31, 2018

Co- Sponsorship Speech of
Akbayan Senator Risa Hontiveros on the Universal Health Care Bill

Despite increasing investments in health and the huge effort on the part of the government to achieve its international developmental commitments in the past 10 years, the country is still far from achieving our goal of obtaining better health outcomes and achieving universal health care for all Filipinos. There remains an imbalance in the health status among the different economic segments of the population. Different studies done by government agencies and NGOs alike consistently point to fact that indicators for critical health outcomes and service coverage rates for essential public health programs and primary health service are lowest among the poorest Filipino families.

Furthermore, complaints persist on the state of hospitals and health facilities in the public sector, which catee to the poorer segments of the population. It would not be uncommon to see run-down public hospitals that are poorly staffed and not fully equipped, over-flowing with patients.

Also, despite the reported 90% coverage rate of the National Health Insurance Program (NHIP), indigent Filipino families are still facing a mountain of challenges just to access a variety of preventive, curative, and rehabilitative health services.

Truly, we are far from our goal of achieving universal health care for our people.

Numerous factors have been cited as barriers to achieving the country's health goals. These include the inadequate resources for health both at the national and local level, maldistribution of health professional, insufficient capacity of health managers, lack of information on health entitlements, among many others. But chief among all these barriers is the fragmentation of health service delivery, an unintended consequence of devolving health to the local government units. This overly decentralized set-up for health allowed political considerations to influence health governance and service delivery. Worse, it forced us to provide health services in discrete packets, instead of delivering it as a continuum from health promotion and disease prevention in the communities up to curative and rehabilitative health services in hospitals and other health facilities. Health advocates and public health experts all agree that this is a major stumbling block to achieving our key objectives on health and development.

So many things have been tried in the past 3 decades by health managers and advocates alike to address these barriers. Earlier attempts to the address the fragmentation of the health system included incentivizing local government units to engage in inter-local cooperation and province-wide investment planning. More recent effort mostly involved direct subsidies from the National Government to LGUs of public health commodities, health human resources through its deployment programs, health insurance in the form of full subsidy of the premiums of the indigents, and capital outlay for various health facilities. All of these were aimed at assisting the local government units perform their mandates of providing quality health care.

While these initiatives have moved the health sector to forward, the inequities in terms of access to health remain. It can be argued that the reasons why the benefits from these efforts have not been fully realized are the lack of scale and consistency in implementing these reforms and the absence of the legal framework to institutionalize these efforts.

Mr. President, today, I am co-sponsoring the Universal Health Care Bill sponsored by Sen JV Ejercito, my chairman in the Committee on Health and Demography. For the record, I filed a version of the UHC Bill which is Senate Bill 1714 or "Healthy Pinoy, Healthy Pinas Bill" as our contribution to the overall discussions of health systems reforms in our country. I have also been closely working with Sen. JV on the version that will be deliberated in the Senate floor.

In a nutshell, the universal health care bill seeks to institutionalize past initiatives of health reform minded managers and advocates, and to institute changes on how health services are going to be delivered in our country. The bill seeks to address barriers in health governance, health human resources, regulations, service delivery, and health information that would prevent Filipinos from accessing care.

Just to mention a few pertinent features of this comprehensive bill, first, it primarily mandates that all Filipinos, especially the poor, are afforded adequate health coverage and are assigned to a primary care provider and to a network of facilities that can deliver quality services. It also aims address the issue of fragmentation of the health care delivery system by providing a framework for the integration of the health system at the level of provinces and highly urbanized cities. Further, it seeks to secure more resources for health by pooling funds from a plethora of health assistance funds from different government agencies. This is coupled by the institutionalization of mechanisms like the Health Technology Assessment and Health Impact Assessment to ensure that funds are spent for cost-effective and useful health interventions. Finally, the bill also institutes changes in the operations of the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation to enhance the delivery of benefits to all Filipinos.

Mr. President and my dear colleagues, this is a truly landmark piece of legislation. Alam ko madalas natin sinasabi yun tungkol sa mga batas na ating pinapasa rito. But this one, I feel, is going to really have a significant and profound positive effect on the health the Filipino people. This bill is going to put us closer on the path to universal health care. I urge my colleagues to support the universal health care bill.

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