HEALTH secretary Francisco Duque urged lawmakers to heed the call of the President in fast tracking the passage of the Universal Health Care (UHC) Bill to put premium on the provision of an inclusive access to quality health care and medical services especially for the underprivileged Filipinos.
"We're more than gratified and we call upon, we appeal to the Senate to fast track their version of this but essentially it's going to be not much different from the executive version of Universal Health Care," Doque said in an interview during the Asia-Pacific Healthy Islands Conference 2018: Networking for Resilient Island Health Systems at The Marco Polo Hotel in Davao City.
The Department of Health (DOH) chief lauded the recent State of the Nation Address (Sona) on Monday of President Rodrigo Duterte after he cited the need to expedite its passage and even certifying the bill as urgent in the previous cabinet meeting earlier this month.
"We're grateful for the President for underscoring this during his State of the Nation Address and we're very thrilled by the President's sense of priority with regard to pushing for the passage of the Universal Health Care law," Doque said.
Duque said that they are just waiting for the Senate version of the UHC Bill. Under the bill, it is aimed to strengthen the provision of primary health care services to capacitate the health stations in every barangay so that the government health services can be felt in the grassroots level.
"We have less than 50 percent, about 42 percent (of barangay health stations) to be exact, but we need to cover a lot more ground in setting up the basic delivery unit of primary health care," he added.
Aside from focusing in the hospitalization, he underscored that the House Bill 4784 is also pushing for the full spectrum of health services from promotion, disease prevention, interventions, curative care, rehabilitation, treatment and palliative care.
Under the proposed UHC Bill, the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) is also reconstituted into the Philippine Health Security Corporation (PHSC) as it becomes the national purchaser of health services.
"On the ground, that is where the issue of primary health care must be brought forth so that our people, grassroots, will be able to access quality health care and not all of them to be going to hospitals, malayo, magastos," he said.
At present, about 92 to 93 percent, or 96 million of the 104 million Filipinos are covered with PhilHealth.
He said bill will get its P137 billion from the Sin taxes and part of the collection from the sweetened beverage tax under the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (Train) law.
A huge part of this is really to cover the part of the population that still needs to have sustainable membership in PhilHealth, P37 billion of those that are not yet covered and P65.2 billion for the provision of primary health care services in the basic delivery unit which are the barangay health stations. (JCR)
