Philippines barely pays the dues to keep its elderly healthy

by Ian Nicolas Cigaral (Philstar.com), 17 Aug 2020

MANILA, Philippines — Filipino senior citizens are forced to dip into their own savings to shoulder rising health costs that come with age, highlighting the insufficiency of public health resources that have come under intense scrutiny amid the pandemic and corruption allegations.

Health spending reached P171.5 billion for the elderly population, or those aged 60 years old and above and considered “vulnerable” as they usually suffer from one or more illnesses, data released by the Philippine Statistics Authority on Monday showed.

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The amount accounted for 22% of total health expenditures worth P799.1 billion recorded that year. By sex, female elderly spent more on their health than their male counterparts.

Of total health disbursements for the elderly, 59% or P101.2 billion were paid out of their pockets or that of their family members, a huge chunk that barely compared to expenses shouldered by the government, through the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. at just 19% and other government programs at 9.5%.

When at least compared with the latter, private health institutions like health maintenance organizations paid more for elderly health with 12.5% share.

The latest report reinforces figures from early this year which showed that overall, Filipinos regardless of age is spending more and more out of their own earnings to remain healthy, a phenomenon unique in Southeast Asia where governments have invested on healthcare to secure their populations.

“Structurally, these are all data in the past that are in normal conditions. But this year, we have an abnormal condition. The conditions with the pandemic are very different and this may not reflect the reality now,” said Jose Ramon Albert, senior research fellow at state-run think tank Philippine Institute for Development Studies.

“That said, the data still give us an idea of the problems in our healthcare system. There are a lot of procurement bottlenecks, field capacity issues also the details of who really benefits from our healthcare system remain unclear, for instance, in the hospitals, why do some hospitals receive bigger aid than others?” he explained.

Politicized public health

It does not help that public health is not shielded from politics. After the Dengvaxia vaccine controversy resulted into tightened procurement rules, PhilHealth is now embroiled into a bigger P15-billion corruption allegations, which partly involved money supposedly spent by the agency to respond to the pandemic.

As it is, PhilHealth’s structure does not even allow pensioners to secure payments for their medicines, which accounted for the biggest spending share. Broken down, 15.7% were spent on treatment of illnesses that now correlate with severe or critical cases of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19).

“The problem is not just PhilHealth. PhilHealth is just an epitome of other agencies because now that we are in a crisis, our concerns are being magnified,” Albert said. “How do you solve that? It’s institution building. But you don’t do that overnight.”

The problem gets worse if one would consider the Philippines’ young population. With most senior citizens likely retired, chances are ballooning health expenses are exhausting their life savings, forcing them to rely on their families for support. Albert said while there is nothing wrong on this per se, the situation shifts the financial responsibility to the younger generations, thereby affecting their own retirement plans.

“Our structure is that we always find ways to help our parents, our seniors. The reality is that we are becoming a support system. The bad effect is that we get stuck in this loop,” Albert said.