A Troubling Health Care Issue

While the story I wrote in my post, A Very Filipino Christmas Story,  is a product of my creativity, it is based on stories that I have witnessed and heard of. In a news article on Philstar titled "Hospital Shopping a Dangerous Experience", the author noted that eleven women die each day from pregnancy and birth complications. Most of these deaths are preventable.

It is very troubling to see that instead of finding ways to establish a public health care system that would address this problem, the House of Representatives can only come up with a copy and paste Reproductive Health Bill. It does not solve anything. Opponents to this bill raised these major points:

• The bill is based on wrong premises. The study of Nobel-prize winner, Simon Kuznets, later confirmed in other studies, found no correlation between population growth and poverty,
• The bill takes away limited government funds from treating many high priority medical and food needs and transfers them to fund harmful and deadly devices.
• Leading secular social scientists like Nobel prize winner, George Akerlof and US National Defense Consultant, Lionel Tiger, have found that contraceptives have harmful social effects (abortion, adultery, female impoverishment, fatherless children, teenage pregnancies, and immorality).

And do not give me that proverbial excuse that the country does not have enough money. For a nation rich with natural resources, it only makes us seem sorrier than ever. The problem lies in the fact that the wealth of the nation is in the hands of a few people, for instance, foul mouthed Willie Revillame who is being sued for half a billion pesos for violating his contract.