February 24, 2008
Health professionals belonging to the Health Alliance for Truth and Justice want corruption stamped out in the country.
“Some 20 percent of the national budget goes to corruption, and seven out of 10 official development aid projects are mostly white elephants that do not deliver economic benefits,” said Dr. Darby Santiago, an alliance convenor.
Santiago decried that corruption means a small health budget that cannot support hospitals like the Philippine General Hospital that has not seen a budget raise in the last 10 years.
The $130-million or P6.5- billion kickback for the scrapped national broadband deal would have paid for antibiotic medication for seven days for 6.5 million patients; anti-tuberculosis treatment for almost 1.1 million patients for six months; and would represent five times the annual budget of Philippine General Hospital that serves around 600,000 patients a year, said Santiago.
If given to the health sector, it would prevent health workers from leaving the country, giving subsistence allowance for 70,000 public health workers for the next five years, or P3,000 across-the-board wage increase of all government health personnel for the next two years.
It would also pay for 15,000 surgeries at P600,000 each, or 49,000 open-heart surgeries at P200,000 each; or 325 cataract surgeries.
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