The government should prioritize improving the Philippines' healthcare system as this is also one of the factors in promoting economic growth, health professionals said.

Prioritizing health has become an important matter amid the Covid-19 pandemic, said Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Association of the Philippines (PHAP) Chairman Emeritus Dr. Beaver Tamesis.

“I think that’s an important issue that came out also during this particular pandemic—what we focus on: economic development or health? It turns out, you have to focus on health because once you have healthy citizens, the economy improves,” said Tamesis during a recent forum.

“This is a very live example that it is not a matter of choosing between health and economics—they come together. But if you only focus on economics, and think that you can only improve health by improving economics, I think we have the situation reversed. I really feel that we should focus on improving health then economy develops,” he added.

Access to medicines “is and should be an election issue,” said former Department of Health (DOH) Secretary Manuel Dayrit.

He emphasized that the government should also address the country’s poverty problem as this is one of the steps to make healthcare affordable for the public.

“I think what we have to understand is this help financing transition is fueled by a number of conditions. The first one is improve socio-economic development. It means that we have to pull our country out of poverty. Twenty-five percent of our people are below the poverty line. Our country has to progress socio-economically to remove poverty,” said Dayrit.

If the government managed to improve the socio-economic status, “people will be paying more taxes because they can afford to pay taxes,” said Dayrit.

“And in many of the developed countries, that's what they do. They pay higher taxes which government spends them to subsidize healthcare. And finally, the government subsidizes healthcare to a greater percentage because they can afford it,” he said.

“So, this is to provide perspective that out-of-pocket expenses can decrease but it's not gonna happen overnight because our socio-economic conditions are not there yet,” he added.

Most Filipinos believe that the government should provide free medicines, based on the recent Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey commissioned by the PHAP.

Based on the survey results, 78 percent of adult respondents said that the government "should definitely" provide free medicines, while 17 percent believe that the government "should probably" provide free medicines.