Invest in UP, PGH

The best use of taxpayers’ money, the best investment that delivers the best outcomes has to be the University of the Philippines and the Philippine General Hospital. Yet, the budgets of these institutions are being cut by President Junior’s Budget department.

For one, the University of the Philippines is the top university in the country, ranked #412 in QS World University Rankings 2023. Indeed, if UP is given a bigger budget to enable it to do more research, it will be ranked even higher.

Still, UP is ahead of other local universities in world rankings despite its comparatively meagre resources. Imagine if it had enough funds to bring back its alumni with advanced degrees in science and the arts who are now working abroad, it can rank among our region’s best.

UP and PGH embody the best of the Filipino we can all be proud of. But based on the proposed P5.268-trillion budget for next year, the university would suffer a budget cut of P2.5 billion and the hospital, P893 million.

(Just for comparison, Pharmally won anywhere from P8 billion to P12 billion in contracts under Duterte’s pandemic response).

It could be a carryover of Duterte’s earlier threat to defund UP because of the protests against his human rights abuses. Duterte is a vengeful provincial warlord. I can understand his hatred of UP in that light.

But this is another era. President Junior should realize his father was a proud UP alumnus, and even in the worst days of his battles with activists among UP’s faculty and students, he respected the university.

House Committee on Appropriations vice chairperson Rep. Stella Luz Quimbo said that budget cuts proposed for UP can still be restored. Rep Quimbo is herself a distinguished alumna of the UP School of Economics where she earned her PhD.

It is the same thing with PGH, Rep. Stella said many lawmakers recognize the value of PGH and “want to help the PGH” get enough funding.

“The PGH is very important, not only is it a very good hospital in Metro Manila servicing many catchment areas … At the same time, it is very important because it is a premier teaching hospital,” Quimbo added.

I recall from past experience covering Congress that our legislators want to put funds meant for PGH into their pork barrel instead of funding PGH directly. This way, those who need help can get a letter from them, addressed to PGH, to admit the patient charged to the legislator’s pork funds. That’s how to keep the poor indebted to them.

Cutting the budget of PGH is worst than stupid, and definitely not in the national interest.PGH was at the forefront in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. The patients they were caring for exceeded the number of available regular beds. Their doctors and nurses worked days and nights with little rest. Some of them died from COVID, infected by their patients.

But that is nothing new for PGH. Like any government hospital, they have to accommodate way more patients than their facilities are designed for, pandemic or not. Based on a World Health Organization 2018 survey, the average bed occupancy for a Level 3 public hospital in NCR was 103 percent in 2012. The international benchmark for optimal efficiency is between 80 to 85 percent.

From its 10-hectare site in the UP Manila campus, and with its 1,100 beds and 400 private beds, the UP PGH provides high-quality medical and healthcare to more than 600,000 patients every year, specially thousands of indigent Filipinos from all over the country.

PGH is important because our healthcare system is so skewed towards expensive private sector hospitals that shut out the poor.

The share of private hospital beds increased from 46 percent in 2003 to 53 percent in 2016. This contributes to the disparity between the available beds for high-income earners using private hospitals and those of low-income earners using public hospitals.

If anything at all, PGH needs more funding from the government and also from the private sector. It should be seen as a social obligation to provide the kind of medical services PGH provides.

There are two PPP proposals to provide ordinary Filipinos greater access to its brand of world-class and affordable tertiary hospital care and comprehensive cancer care: the UP Philippine General Hospital (UP PGH) Cancer Center in Manila and the UP PGH Diliman.

Cancer is a horrible disease and being diagnosed with it is almost a death sentence, specially if you cannot afford the millions of pesos required to deal with it. Cancer is now the second leading cause of mortality in the country after diseases of the heart and the vascular system.

Four Filipinos die of cancer every hour or 96 cancer patients every day. In 2020, over 150,000 new cases and 90,000 deaths were recorded. During the first half of 2021, over 27,000 deaths from cancer were recorded by the Philippine Statistics Authority or nine percent of the total deaths during this period.

The UP-PGH Cancer Center is UP’s response to cancer care’s growing challenge and complexity. It will be a 200 to 300-bed dedicated cancer center within the University’s Manila campus in Ermita.

With at least half of all beds exclusively serving underprivileged Filipinos, the new facility will offer advanced, integrated, and affordable oncology care services to those who cannot otherwise access the kind of treatments available in private hospitals.

The proposed UP PGH Diliman will be a 700-bed public tertiary hospital accessible to the poor. It will be built on a 4.2-hectare area in the UP Diliman campus in Quezon City, near the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute.

Drawing on the University’s knowledge and research capacities in many disciplines, from the STEM fields to the social sciences to the arts and humanities, the UP PGH Diliman has the potential to be a top research hospital in our region.

Quality education and healthcare are two very urgent needs of our country. Unless we are able to provide these today, future generations of Filipinos will have nothing much to look forward to.

Investing in UP and PGH will no doubt deliver the best return on investment of public funds. Their budgets should be increased, not cut.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco