The Philippines has seen relatively more challenges due to the Covid-19 Pandemic than perhaps its other South-east Asian counterparts. Despite the crafting of the historic Universal Health Care (UHC) Law over two years ago, the Pandemic has exposed several gaps in both public health infrastructures and national health policies. The Laws aims to ‘provide equitable access to quality and affordable healthcare services while protecting against financial health risk for every Filipino’.
Despite the highly noble intent, however, implementation of such a law for over 100 million people requires heavy financial and infrastructural resources that can only be generated progressively, a point made time and again by the Department of Health.
‘The transformation of the whole health system to achieve a sincere universal healthcare will entail serious investments by the government’
“The interlinking dynamics of health and the economy and the disruptive consequences of its imbalance is one of the hardest lessons of this pandemic.” Orlando Oxales, lead convenor of CitizenWatch Philippines
The information has been sourced from a Businessworld opinion piece by Alvin Manalansan, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Stratbase ADR Institute and a Convenor of CitizenWatch Philippines.
Do you have an opinion about the UHC Act in Philippines? Do you have anything to add about the government’s initiatives on financing the recovery from COVID-19 and healthcare services in general? Do you have anything to say about the author or CitizenWatch Philippines?
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