Lawmaker: Proposed hospital corporatization not anti-poor

REPRESENTATIVE Anthony Golez Jr. (Bacolod City, lone district) denied on Thursday that his House Bill 6069, which will create National Government hospital corporations, is anti-poor.

Golez gathered various stakeholders and resource speakers at the University of Negros Occidental Recoletos (UNO-R) to clarify to the residents the objectives of the bill.

Several people criticized the bill for being anti-poor, as it was reportedly pushing for the privatization of government hospitals, but Golez said there is no privatization scheme in the bill.

Instead, he said it aims to make the delivery of health care faster, affordable and more efficient by converting the 26 regional hospitals into National Government Hospital Corporations.

BACOLOD. Representative Anthony Golez Jr. explains during the public forum at UNO-R Thursday that House Bill 6069 is not meant to privatize public hospitals but to improve the delivery of health care. (Carla N. Canet)

He said the poor should not worry about the bill because with their Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) coverage, they can choose both the public and private hospitals when they get sick.

He said that with the corporatization, public hospitals will have the freedom to use their resources on their discretion without passing through a tedious and lengthy bureaucratic system that public hospitals currently practice.

"(Regional hospitals) need not go through the process of asking permission from the regional up to the central office of the DOH (Department of Health) when a public hospital needs to buy spare parts of medical equipment. Through the creation of the Board of Directors, public hospitals can be managed efficiently with the inclusion of experts in finance and other managerial aspect of running the hospital," he said.

The present set-up is that a public hospital is run by a chief of hospital whose expertise is only confined on medicines but who does not have the business acumen to run the hospital.

Under the bill, public hospitals will be efficiently run by experts in the fields of medicines and business and the profit that hospitals earn will go to the improvement of the services.