Health workers decried the P1 billion budget cut on Maintenance and Other Operating Expenses (MOOE) of four government-owned and controlled corporations (GOCC).
The Philippine Children's Medical Center (PCMC) suffered the biggest cut in MOOE with P891 million, followed by the Lung Center of the Philippines (LCP) with P100 million cut, P28 million for Philippine Heart Center (PHC), and P8 million cut in MOOE for National Kidney and Transplant Institute (NKTI).
“We, health workers, are resentful and enraged with the Duterte government because in the midst of COVID-19 pandemic and health crisis, it has the gall to reduce the budget for the MOOE of four GOCC hospitals by P1 Billion. This government is inhumane and has no compassion for the health and lives of the people, especially the vagrants and destitute who cannot afford to pay heavily for their hospitalization,” said Robert Mendoza, Alliance of Health Workers (AHW) National President.
Effects of budget cut
Mendoza said the MOOE budget reduction would mean no available medicines and medical supplies, insufficient payment for salaries of contractual health workers, and no budget for Collective Negotiation Agreement (CNA) incentives to unionized health workers.
"The decreased MOOE budget in the GOCC hospitals is very alarming since this budget is intended for the assistance to indigent patients. With the budget cut, many indigent patients will now be sent away and will be deprived of the medical services of these hospitals," he added.
PCMC is a tertiary hospital with a 200-bed capacity mainly catering to pediatric care, the AHW noted the big MOOE cut in the hospital means "deprivation of medical attention to poor children with serious illnesses."
Meanwhile, many PHC indigent patients may now need to shell out P500,000 down payment before they can avail of the heart by-pass surgery. Likewise, many poor NKTI patients will now be deprived to undergo a kidney transplant that would cost at least P1.5 Million each patient, the group said.
AHW added that inaccessibility and non-affordability of medical services resulting from budget cuts would mean an increase in mortality and morbidity rate.
Understaffing
On Aug. 11, five units of off-site modular hospitals with a total of 108 beds were turned over from the national government to LCP. These modular units are for COVID-19 patients with moderate and severe cases.
“It is ironic that as the DOH and the Duterte government increased the COVID-19 capacity of our hospital, they otherwise plan to cut the budget for our MOOE amounting to P100M. This is totally unacceptable. More so, we are disgusted because as they add more COVID-19 facilities, they do not hire additional health workers to handle COVID-19 patients. We demand that the MOOE budget for the GOCC hospitals should be doubled instead especially now that we are in a pandemic,” lamented Eleazar Sobinsky, President, Lung Center of the Philippine Employees Association-Alliance of Health Workers (LCPEA-AHW).
Sobinsky said they are experiencing "severe understaffing" as many health workers filing for early retirement or resignation. Recently, he added, 10 nurses resigned from their post due to over fatigue, burnout, and extreme demoralization of low salary and unjust benefits.
"With that, we cannot blame our fellow health workers who chose to work abroad because for a very long time our plight has been neglected by this government and we are even put in a more deplorable situation now in this time of pandemic", Sobinsky continued.
Increase health budget
AHW challenged the senators to "make a stand for the good of the majority of the Filipino people and for the health workers' safety, protection, rights, and welfare.
Health workers appealed to the senators to increase health budget to P2 trillion and allot the budget for direct public health service and COVID-19 response; restore the P1 billion MOOE budget cut of GOCC hospitals; realign P79.9 billion PhilHealth budget directly to all public hospitals and facilities; increase national minimum salary of health workers to P16,000 per month; mass hire regular heath workers; and appropriate all COVID-19 benefits in the General Appropriation Act (GAA).