In his article, IPN’s Campaign for Fighting Diseases director Philip Stevens, who gave a lecture at the recent Asian Institute of Management-sponsored conference on healthcare reform in the Philippines, urged local stakeholders to put patients at the heart of all the healthcare talks or they will go on dying from easily preventable diseases.
Stevens said, "It is the Filipino patient who is suffering from the current debate’s fixation with patents and prices (of medicines). It is taking away energy and discussion from the things that really matter: healthcare infrastructure, doctors, nurses and insurance schemes."
In the face of such a widespread health crisis, Stevens said diverting energy and attention toward patents is doing a disservice to patients.
Citing India as an example, he said that although the country, since 1975, has weak intellectual property laws that have driven down the prices of medicines, access to even basic medicines remains unacceptably low.
"For the Indian poor," Stevens wrote, "the price of drugs is not the issue. The real issue is the parlous state of their healthcare infrastructure. The government-run system is a shambles, riddled with inefficiency and corruption, and beset by a lack of resources. The transport network is so bad that rural people struggle to get to a clinic, even if one exists within 100 miles of their home."
Drawing parallels with the situation in the Philippines, Stevens wrote that during his brief stay in Manila he had learned that "… an incredible 40 percent of people go through their entire adult lives without even seeing a doctor. Health clinics and hospitals are in short supply. PhilHealth, the government-run social insurance scheme, provides very basic cover for only around half of the population. The exodus of healthcare workers for better opportunities overseas has reached such high levels that the Alliance of Healthcare workers had warned that the healthcare system faces imminent collapse."
He observed that the government is compounding the dire situation by increasing VAT on pharmaceuticals from 10 to 12 percent and subjecting even previously exempt services like doctors’ fees to it. In effect, this amounts to little more than a tax on the sick and the dying and makes a mockery of the government’s other work in healthcare.
Stevens also noted that as a result of these failures of governance, some basic indicators of health in the Philippines, like life expectancy and child mortality rates, have lagged behind those of its neighbors in Asia.
He warned that unless healthcare infrastructure as well as health workers’ migration and insurance schemes are improved, people will go on dying even from easily preventable diseases.