Local, foreign groups ask Palace to release DOH appropriations

A group of individuals and civil society groups around the globe urged President Gloria Arroyo to release appropriations made in the national budget of 2008 for the Department of Health (DOH), specifically for the purchase of autoclave machines for treatment of infectious medical waste. An autoclave is a device for sterilizing equipment and supplies by subjecting them to high-pressure steam at 121°Celsius or more.

In a letter to President Arroyo, 1,200 individuals and organizations from Argentina, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nepal, South Africa, Uganda and the United States on Wednesday demanded the release of the funds for the purchase of the autoclave machines worth P100 million and for implementation of the tuberculosis program (P400 million) and of the family health program (P1.82 billion).

“Amid warnings of a reenacted 2010 budget, we are hopeful that the impounded 2008 budget will still be released,” Merci Ferrer, the executive director of Health Care Without Harm-Southeast Asia, told reporters.

“Public health must always be the utmost concern of our government. We have seen the public-health damage brought about by typhoons that visited the country [recently]. We do not want to be caught unprepared when climate change brings in more public-health chaos,” she said.

From the Philippines, petitioners included Ferrer’s group, Social Watch-Philippines (SWP) and Alternative Budget Initiative (ABI) and several nongovernment organizations and health-care groups from different parts of the country.

“While everyone is busy thinking about the 2010 elections, we urge [the President] to look at the budget and give the health sector what is due [them],” Ferrer said.

Former National Treasurer Leonor Briones, the lead convener of SWP, said that Mrs. Arroyo has been impounding funds since 2008 when she introduced the notion of a conditional veto.

“SWP and ABI members were appalled when the President in her veto message on the budget in 2008 said that any realignment proposed by legislature will have to be approved by her for release. This debilitated the power of the purse of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Increases in the allocations for critical socioeconomic services such as health, education, agriculture and environment which were included in the General Appropriations Act through the initiative of the legislature were not being
released,” Briones noted.

“The problem is both Houses [of Congress] agreed to this conditional veto of the President. She combined this with orders, which allowed her to impound certain budget items and move them at her discretion. This was a combination of savings, impoundment and conditional veto. Since 2008, the President has always intervened in the release of the funds and has been transferring funds to various departments and bodies which are not part of the executive,” she said.

The former National Treasurer also noted that the overall savings of P140 billion, as recorded in the 2010 National Expenditure Program (NEP), represent impoundment of unreleased appropriations.

“Officials of various implementing agencies already attested that the overall savings being reported by the Department of Budget and Management [DBM] are actually unreleased appropriations. Also the departments were not given the opportunity to generate savings from these appropriations,” Briones said.

She added that the record on overall savings in the NEP 2010 contained transfers to and from bodies such as the Commission on Audit, Commission on Elections, Commission on Human Rights, Congress, the judiciary and Office of the Ombudsman.

“They should have been off-limits to the President’s prerogative,” Briones said.

ABI has been calling on legislators to immediately issue provisions against the impoundment of funds by the executive. The group also called on the Budget department to provide proper documentation of fund transfers from one government agency to another.

The Audit commission already complained that the “DBM could not provide the appropriate documentation where the savings came from or the agency whose funds/savings were transferred to another agency.” –LAILANY P. GOMEZ REPORTER, Manila Times