New health secretary

One year should be a long enough time for the President to make up his mind on who to appoint as health secretary. The position is more important than our presidents, past and present, seem to think. Even without a pandemic, our healthcare system is almost non-existent.

Actually, the health secretary need not be a medical doctor. A terribly good administrator with some background in healthcare would be a good fit. The health department is really a bureaucracy that must be made more efficient. Minimizing corruption is top priority, but also cutting down on waste like vaccines and drugs expiring or rendered unusable due to improper management and storage.

It is rare to have a Dr. Alran Bengzon who is both a good doctor and a good manager. I remember waking up at dawn to join him in an inspection of provincial hospitals in Southern Luzon via air force helicopters when he was health secretary. Dr. Bengzon manages by moving around.

Another name that comes to mind as a potentially good manager of the national health system is Dr. Bengzon’s nephew, Eckie Gonzalez. The two have a bitter fight over control of Medical City, which Eckie has been managing over the past years. A finance man (MBA Harvard), Eckie is just the guy to fix among others, PhilHealth and the other financial problems that prevent government hospitals from rendering all the help needed by every Filipino.

If the President thinks the next health secretary should be a doctor, I hope he picks one who is an expert in public health and epidemiology. We have never given our public health specialists the respect and support they need.

I should know from the experience of my late father who was a specialist in public health and tropical medicine. He spent most of his career in the university, but was often called to help untangle problems with tropical diseases. I recall one time he was consulted to help deal with soldiers dying more of malaria in Mindanao than from the bullets of the separatists.

Anyway, the next health secretary should be selected not just because he or she is a good politician. Indeed, a good secretary should be expected to make decisions on the basis of science and not out of political considerations. I hope the President will be wary of doctors who are politicians with motives other than public service.

Then too, doctors who have been in the government bureaucracy too long may be too jaded to have the capacity to think of out-of-the-box solutions to the long festering problems of the health department. The best fit is a good doctor with managerial skills and is familiar with finance. I am not sure if any of the medical graduates of the Ateneo School of Medicine, who also have a Masters in Business Administration, are ready for the top job. But that is the idea.

The next health secretary will have to immediately prepare the country to handle the next pandemic. Actually, COVID is still around with rising cases. If there is one thing we should have learned over the last three years is the ability of this virus to mutate. Lucky for us the current mutation is not deadly, even if it is easily infectious. Who is to say it won’t mutate to become both deadly and highly infectious?

And it is not just COVID. There are other viruses out there that could be as deadly or as concerning. Monkeypox is an example. Dengue is another. Or there could be some super bacteria that no current antibiotics can kill. We need a good monitoring mechanism in the field so that proper steps can be taken early. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough health centers and worse, we don’t have enough doctors or nurses to man the health centers we have. We give our best to the world… remember?

The biggest challenge of the next health secretary is financial in nature. How can we make healthcare affordable and available to everyone? This problem became starkly clear to me when the wife of our driver was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Lucky for them, they live across the street from Rizal Medical Center. Lucky for them too, fellow columnist Cito Beltran interceded for them to get the help needed.

But not all that is required is available from Rizal Medical. Some prescribed therapy can only be had in private hospitals and the cost is in the hundreds of thousands. So, we have to see what friends in Pagcor and other institutions can do to help. But why should a patient already worried about cancer have to worry about paying the costs of getting treated?

It is difficult to buy the explanation that we don’t have the money for the health needs of every Filipino. We see how our officials waste our public funds and we are sure a proper use of what we pay in taxes will cover much more of the health costs of being Filipino. DOH is notorious for wasting funds.

In Dec. 2, 2022, it was reported that “the Department of Health (DOH) has shrugged off the wastage of some P15.6-billion worth of COVID-19 vaccines, saying this was well within the acceptable threshold of vaccine wastage set by the World Health Organization (WHO).” It might be an acceptable threshold of wastage by the WHO, but for a Pinoy taxpayer, this is simply criminal negligence.

As the Inquirer editorial observed: “the agency’s callous disregard for the billions of pesos lost in scarce pandemic funds and much-needed COVID-19 vaccines is unacceptable, and betrays the appalling mismanagement of basic pandemic response by government bodies tasked to handle it: the DOH, the Health Technology Assessment Council, and the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases.

“Worse is the DOH’s proprietorial attitude toward public funds sourced from taxpayers who were doubly defrauded, in this instance, their hard-earned money dribbling down the drain and their health risks multiplied by the loss of vaccines – computed at P500 per dose – that more people could have availed of.”

Hopefully, the next secretary of health will make sure things will be done better.

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