Investors wanted

Waiting for a routine medical checkup last week I came across an article about how Jorge M. Garcia, the boy from Laguna who made good and became a renowned heart surgeon, founded the Asian Hospital and Medical Center.

Garcia, who studied here and worked for many years in the United States, said in the interview that no new major hospital had been built in Manila for a long time.  He wanted not only to build another hospital, but to make it one that could be at par with the best in the US where services are like those in five-star hotels.

So Garcia sought partners, raised funds, probably developed cardiovascular problems from stress and setbacks, but he got his hospital built, and it raised the bar for health care in the top hospitals.

Since then St. Luke’s Medical Center has built a new complex in Bonifacio Global City while The Medical City has moved to a more spacious, modern home along Ortigas. Several existing hospitals have also expanded and upgraded their facilities.

Still, the pace of construction of new hospitals in recent decades is a miniscule fraction of the construction rate in shopping malls and housing.

Construction of new schools is just as inadequate. The public school system isn’t alone in suffering from inability to cope with population growth. The top private schools have also barely expanded their facilities since my student days.

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During the Spanish colonial period, the top educational institutions, mostly with Spanish names and operated by religious orders, were concentrated within the Walled City, with a few located near the governor-general’s palace, Malacañang.

The Americans developed public schools during the Commonwealth, opening the University of the Philippines along Padre Faura in Manila. The city’s University Belt also began to emerge with the establishment of the Far Eastern University.

As the student population ballooned, UP developed its Diliman campus in the newly established Quezon City.

Several schools destroyed during World War II in Manila later followed UP to the cogon lands of Quezon City. There’s an apocryphal tale about a Jesuit priest grousing that “only the children of Tarzan” would study at the Ateneo de Manila in Loyola Heights. But Ateneo thrived in its new location.

In Manila, other private universities were also established after the war, among them the University of the East, Feati University and Lyceum of the Philippines. A few schools remained in Intramuros, among them Colegio de San Juan de Letran. UP maintained its Padre Faura campus, which is home to its College of Medicine whose students work in the adjacent Philippine General Hospital.

It’s notable that after the war, major investments went into the construction of educational institutions.

Large private investments in hospitals were fewer, with religious orders mainly the ones providing health care since the Spanish era. During the American occupation, several public and private hospitals were built. The original St. Luke’s opened way back in 1903. The Maryknoll Sisters founded St. Paul’s Hospital before the war. When it was destroyed in the fighting, the Archdiocese of Manila under Rufino Cardinal Santos provided funds for rebuilding. In 1974 the hospital became the Cardinal Santos Memorial Hospital.

Perhaps ordinary businessmen associate hospitals too much with charity work requiring high investments with low profitability. In 1891, Chinese businessmen Chan Guan and Mariano Velasco along with Carlos Palanca Tanchueco put together funds for a charity clinic for the poor in Manila. This would become the Hospital de Chinos that in 1917 became the Chinese General Hospital. In 1910, a group of Filipinos and Americans established the Philippine Anti-tuberculosis Society, which founded the Quezon Institute in 1938.

Colleges and universities offering medical courses also found it convenient to have hospitals where their students could undergo training. Several private hospitals with no tie-ups to schools, however, were established by doctors pursuing their dreams.

Many smaller private hospitals around the country were established by doctors pooling their resources. In 1969, as Makati was starting to emerge as the nation’s financial and high-end commercial hub, obstetrician-gynecologist Constantino Manahan, surgeon Jose Fores and cardiologist Mariano Alimurung opened the Makati Medical Center.

The Medical City followed later.

Apart from religious orders and doctors, there’s another source of the kind of massive investments required for a top-quality hospital: Juan de la Cruz. And it’s easy to draw such huge amounts from public funds with no questions asked under a dictatorship.

So we also saw specialized public hospitals built during the Marcos regime, among them the Philippine Heart Center for Asia, the National Kidney and Transplant Institute and the Lung Center of the Philippines.

Today we still don’t have enough health care facilities, whether private or state-funded. This is evident in the long waits at the top private hospitals and long lines at laboratory and diagnostic centers. Enter any of the government hospitals, particularly PGH, and the overcrowding can be depressing.

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We also don’t have enough schools. In Metro Manila, most of the universities are still concentrated in Quezon City and Manila. Any serious effort to decongest Metro Manila must include a program to encourage these schools to build satellites at least in the peripheries of the National Capital Region. Or else new players can be invited to set up shop in these peripheries.

Property developers and local government units should support such a move. Where schools are built, everything else follows: residential areas, which pave the way for the construction of commercial centers and offices, and why not, hospitals. We saw this happen in Quezon City.

Even expats can’t find enough international schools for their children. I’ve been told that this is a deterrent to foreign investments. Foreign executives typically want to bring their families along with them, and having schools for their children is a major consideration when moving overseas.

The British School, with an enrollment of about 900, needs to expand but is looking for an area less pricey than Bonifacio Global City where it is currently located. 

There is a large, unmet and ever growing demand. Even with many services going to charity, education and health care are certain to be hugely profitable. There’s no reason why investors should shy away from putting their money in building new, top-quality schools and hospitals.