Dictatorship and healthcare

With the commemoration this month of the infamous Martial Law era in our history, a question may come up on whether dictatorship is bad for our health. Here, unlike in the human rights domain, data from other countries demonstrated a mixed result.

The case of Turkmenistan is a case in point on how healthcare can be badly impacted by a despotic regime.

Turkmenistan is a country in Asia, but in the central part of this large continent, while the Philippines is in the southeast region. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it gained independence, but fell prey to an increasingly totalitarian regime with its human rights violations passionately condemned by the United Nations.

Bernd Rechel and Martin McKee, who studied it in 2007 and reported in BMC Medicine noted that it resulted in a neglect of its healthcare system and involvement with drug trafficking from Afghanistan. This has similarity with the Philippines today with the emergence of large hauls of drugs from China that have been traced to the so-called Davao group. The only difference is with the Philippines and the President’s current war on drugs, the Filipinos still do not know if it had decreased drug supply in the country or simply masked an increase of its entry from China or somewhere else.

The fundamental culprit, according to Rechel and McKee, was the government’s “policy of secrecy and denial.” It is up to the readers to determine whether the current regime, which is running our country today, is practicing this policy of secrecy and denial. What we have seen though is a policy of fake news, which may be tantamount to the same policy. Or is it?

However, the case of Fidel Castro’s Cuba stood opposite to the case in Turkmenistan. The UK-based newspaper The Guardian reported on Nov. 27, 2016 that Cuba’s life expectancy is at par with highly developed countries, accompanied by 100 percent literacy. The Philippines still cannot claim this high accomplishment in literacy level. Its life expectancy of 81 years old for women (and 77 years old for men) is almost at par with the United Kingdom’s 83 years old (and 70 years old, respectively).

It will be great if you, dear readers, will take time to check our healthcare performance during the Martial Law era to see our prospects in healthcare should another dictatorship emerge amidst us. Then maybe all of us can really think it through how this country should proceed in the future at least based on our healthcare prospects.