Cha-Cha will kill public healthcare – HEAD

Press release: February 24, 2018

The 100% foreign ownership provision under the Duterte administration's charter-change (Cha-Cha) completes the long-term scheme to sell and privatize public utilities, including government hospitals. Foreign corporations want complete takeover, and the Duterte administration, in connivance with the supermajority in Congress, is too eager to oblige. This will usher the death of public healthcare.

Healthcare has long been targeted to be part of free-market opportunities. Notice how most hospital equipment, even syringes and cotton balls, are all imported and expensive? That is just one aspect. The beautification of government hospitals – despite understaffing, inadequate beds, and lack of medicine and supplies – is no accident. Government policy dictates superficial improvements to make hospitals enticing for investors, and Duterte's Cha-Cha ensures that foreign corporations can own government hospitals.

Corporate takeover of healthcare will result to increased healthcare costs. And with 100% takeover, government funds through PhilHealth will only be siphoned to make huge profits for these foreign corporations. That is if PhilHealth coverage can be availed in the first place, otherwise out-of-pocket expenditures of patients will sky rocket.

The Duterte administration's Cha-Cha will constitutionalize privatization, deregularization, denationalization, and free trade deals. Public healthcare in the Philippines will not only worsen but will cease to exist under Cha-cha, and with this comes the death of Filipinos.

Charter change will erode the remaining pro-people and nationalist provisions of the 1987 Constitution. The phrase "security of tenure" will be deleted, allowing businesses to make super profit, but upon the back of contractual labor and cheap wage. Genuine agrarian reform will be thrown out of the way, allowing more foreign plantations for export instead of sustainable growth. Medicines shall remain expensive because they are imported, despite raw materials being sourced here.

If we want to increase health workers' wages, the sale of hospitals to private and foreign corporations needs to be prevented. If we want free and accessible healthcare services, we need to overcome free-market ideologies that seek to profit over health. If we want a free, comprehensive, and progressive healthcare system, we need to stop charter change.##