Status of the “free dialysis”campaign
The news was sketchy, without details on authorship and other elements of news. Still, it was a powerful and welcome development that the Philipine Congress has passed on first reading a bill to make dialysis a free medical service. I learned this through e-mail messages from friends who recalled that patients and media practitioners in Baguio launched the other year a signature campaign to make this life-saving medical procedure free of charge, considering that patients have to undergo the same at least twice a week for a lifetime.
We still have to get the details, but there was that information in the news item that the Department of Social Welfare and Development will determine who will be entitled to free dialysis service based on the patient’s incapacity to pay.
Given the expense (P1,200 at the least per session and several thousand pesos more in other lowland areas), hardly is there a Filipino patient who can afford to sustain the life-time treatment averaging two to four times a week for a life-time. Having to undergo the crucial procedure four times a week, I am now on panic button, as my retirement pay after 41 years in the government service, has been exhausted by my closeto-three years on dialysis.
That’s the reason why we reacted to the bill filed by Senator Sonny Angara who proposed that patients receiving P50,000 and below income in a month should be considered for free dialysis. We argued that dialysis patients, because of their medical condition, can hardly work and therefore can hardly earn that amount. Even if they do earn P100,000 or over in a month, the amount would still be short of what they need to keep their dialysis and medicines going. If the ceiling would be approved, we argued, many, if not all of dialysis patients would have no recourse but to lie and declare that their personal income is less than P50,000 a month just so they would be among those qualified for this medical incentive that has long been a given in western countries.
In the United States, Canada and Great Britain, dialysis service is administered free of charge. This is so because dialysis is a life-saving measure; if you don’t undergo it, you will die. It is a policy in Western countries to treat emergencies, with or without the financial capacity of the patient to pay the costs. Here, you die if you don’t have what it takes to pay the costs/ It reminds me that time my son Johann went down to Metro-Manila with other pony boys of the Wright Park, for them to hire out their ponies in a carnival. Johann had a bad fall, breaking his arm, but the hospital refused to treat his arm as he had no money for the down payment. He then rode a bus for Baguio and got down at the Baguio General Hospital where doctors immediately did what had to be done to ease his pain and fear. The Baguio doctors never asked him whether he had money to pay for the procedure.
In the proposal for free dialysis, we suggested that members of both houses of Congress give part of their individual medical assistance fund to a pool from which will be drawn payments for the dialysis of accredited patients. Under the present set-up, patients and their relatives have to write these solons, providing them with their medical papers, hoping that the legislator would provide at least five sessions to help the patients make it through the next year.
Under the present set-up, 90 sessions per year is allotted by the Philhealth for each dialysis patient. This is whittled down each time a patient is hospitalized as his confinement bills are also charged to Philhealth, deducted to his 90-session per year allotment. That’s why many dialysis patients refuse to undergo hospital confinement even if they need to, just so they could save on their Phlhealth allocation for dialysis.
What is tragic is when a patient decides to call it quits after his or her Philhealth allocation has been used up. I am aware of such decisions, resulting in