Wednesday, September 03, 2008 Carvajal: From the frying pan to the fire By Orlando P. Carvajal Break Point
INEFFICIENCY is written all over the face of monopoly you could practically make it an essential part of that word’s definition. Give me a monopoly and I’ll give you an inefficient operation. And what is the best example of a monopoly? You are right, the government. Mainly because it is a monopoly it is notoriously inefficient.
How can the Land Transportation Office (LTO), for instance, be motivated to be efficient when we cannot go anywhere else to register our cars? Hence, if you want something run efficiently give it to the private sector where competition makes the players efficient the way Globe, Bayantel and Cebu Pacific have made PLDT and PAL (former monopolies) more efficient.
Strictly speaking, running a hospital is not government work and hence can be privatized. But the private sector can only run it efficiently by charging standard fees for medical services. Once privately run, it cannot anymore deliver the free health services to the needy in the community. Selling the Cebu City Medical Center (CCMC), therefore, to a private enterprise group would essentially defeat the purpose for which it was established.
For free health care services to continue, the city mayor contemplates on moving these to the clinics and birthing centers of the city. My objection to this is related to the fact that these are still government-run operations and can be presumed to be also inefficient and corrupt, considering that inefficiency is inherent in government and corruption is endemic in all parts of the bureaucracy.
Channeling the sick poor towards these smaller health clinics will not solve the problem of inefficiency and corruption that ail the CCMC. Besides, many of the ailments brought to the CCMC for cure cannot be taken care of by health clinics and birthing centers that have even less facilities and less space than the CCMC. Selling the CCMC is to throw medically challenged indigents from the frying pan to the fire.
If the problem is inefficiency and corruption, why not take a cue from the medical profession and excise the tumor. The City really has no choice but to accept the challenge of running a government hospital efficiently and honestly. Either that or fail miserably to provide adequate health care to the less privileged.
The mayor just sacked some hand-picked bright persons in his staff for failure to come up to his standards of performance. Why can’t he do that with the hospital staff? Take out the inefficient and corrupt so CCMC survives and the poor among us get their right to adequate health care.
The decision on what to do with the CCMC should be about how to make it run more efficiently so the poor continue to have access to adequate medical care and attention.
