The Pangasinan Star ONLINE

The Pen Speaks
Danny O. Sagun


TWO sensational killings in Pangasinan appear to have been solved this week with the identification and arrest of suspects. We commend our law enforcers for doing their job in the solution of the killing of lady Judge Paas from Natividad and Dr. Cerdan Lopez of Calasiao. The judge was murdered right in her home while the doctor was killed while maneuvering his Honda CRV out of a hotel in that town with his wife.

What’s amusing in these developments however is the penchant for grabbing credit by our enforcers, be they policemen or NBI personnel.

PNP Chief Art Lomibao personally came to town last Friday to present to media the suspects in the killing of the judge. The local PNP together with an organic body, the CIDG, claimed credit for the feat. Left in the cold was the NBI which surely worked hard too for the solution of the case. Good thing for the NBI it was able to solve the Lopez killing—bagging even a well-known operative of the Public Order and Safety Office (POSO) who acted as the “contact” for the hired killer, which itself was as sensational an issue as the solution of the case. Are some faces red?

It is a fact though that people trust the NBI more than the police in the handling of cases. Even trivial ones are brought to the attention of that agency. That’s a consolation for the hardworking agents at the local NBI office and their chief Joe Doloiras and his men Dave Alunan, Philip Pecache and Ges Gallang, whom we have worked with in our various information campaigns.

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A holder of a PhilHealth ID should not assume he is free of the hassle once he is hospitalized. He can only get as much, literally only a discount of, say, 20 percent or even less of his hospital bill particularly if he chooses a private hospital.

Have you heard of so-called hold-up hospitals? We don’t need to elaborate.

Our experience show that government-run hospitals, for their ordinary wards, charge what PhilHealth gives as medicare benefits, say P400 for ward in a tertiary hospital. It may be true also with laboratory fees and professional (doctor’s) fees. What the patient/beneficiary will have to worry about is his medicines which are most of the time unavailable at the pharmacy so he will have to buy from outside drugstores. If he has no money, the hospital could not do anything. His Philhealth ID is practically nothing in that situation. We repeat. Your ID is not a guarantee of a hassle-free hospitalization.

Overall though, a Philhealth ID holder, pays much less for his admission and confinement in a government hospital than if he were confined in the private ones. Only that, in the former, you have to bear with congested rooms/ wards, indifferent personnel to include nurses and doctors, and other inconveniences. That is why some prefer private medical institutions.

It is very sad to note however that charges by private hospitals are almost beyond reach of ordinary mortals like us. An ordinary ward in a secondary private hospital costs P450 to P600 per day, and Philhealth could only shoulder P300. Special rooms with aircon cost P1,000 to P1,500 a day. Medicines from their pharmacy cost pretty much higher compared to outside drugstores.

And professional fees? Here lies the big difference. The attending physician charges P2,250 to P3,000 for a three-day-confinement aside from his daily visitation fee of P750 to P1,000 per day. No wonder you will have to shell out some P20,000 for just a minimum confinement of three days in a private hospital—and in the ward at that. Philhealth can only answer for some P4,000. So where to get the balance to settle your bills? Scrape for it in the bottom of your resources, that’s where.

There must be some regulations on the operation of our medical institutions, public and private. The main concern is to deliver service not only to earn profit.