SB 1520: Medical Scholarship Act
Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph G. Recto
14 September 2020

Mr. President:

Against diseases, we have to find a vaccine. But when it comes to our collective health, there is a thing called institutional inoculation.

This bill inoculates us against a future where doctors are so scarce in many areas that it denies our people the most basic of human rights: the right to live a healthy life.

The training of doctors should not be left to individual dreams or family finances alone, or what the heart desires and the pocket can afford.

Government should develop this precious human resource. Because being a doctor should never be dependent on the family’s tax returns.

If airlines have pilot farms, then why can’t the government nurture this talent that is necessary for humankind to survive?

Mr. President:

It is a given that doctors, in Humphrey’s words, attend to those in the shadows of life – the sick.

They also care for those who are in the dawn of life – our children; and those in the twilight of life – the elderly.

So producing more doctors is about future-proofing our society, to serve both ends of the demographic scale.

Four babies are born every minute in this land. 6,120 every 24 hours. 2.23 million a year. We love babies so much that we produce them in an industrial scale.

As we are swamped with more babies in diapers, so we must produce more men and women in white coats in the same fast and furious clip.

The other end of the spectrum is that we are a graying country. Two decades ago, there were only 4.6 million Filipinos 60 years and older. Today, there are more than 10 million.

Today, seniors account for 8.6 percent of our population. By 2050, their share will be about 16.5 percent.

While seniors whose candles in their birthday cake are more expensive than the cake itself may brag that 70 is the new 50, the fact is that their staying power will impact our nation’s financial health.

Globally, one disease alone – dementia – costs one trillion US dollars to manage in one year. It will double to two trillion US dollars in 10 years.

Although we have yet to forecast how much this disease would cost our economy, there is no doubt it would be high.

So this is the future that we have to brace for.

At present, the pandemic has already showed us the need for doctors. But COVID or not, this bill is the required companion measure to the Universal Health Care Law.

We may give every Filipino a PhilHealth card, but it will be useless if the facility he can present that card to for treatment has no doctor to attend to him.

We may erect hospitals, but if there are no physicians who will staff them, then what we have built are white elephants.

We may allot billions of pesos in health care, but if we cannot hire the right number of doctors required, then it will be money down the drain.

We may be able to bring down the prices of drugs, and stock our pharmacies full of them, but they will remain out of reach for the sick if there will be no physician to write the prescription.

It is, however, wrong for us to view a doctor’s role to heal and cure alone.

There is also the preventative aspect of medicine. And the more doctors we can embed in communities, the more champions we have on the ground who will act as primary health lynchpins whose focus is how to prevent people from getting sick.

The stress on the preventative will nip sickness in the bud and from a fiscal health point of view save money for the government.

Not all prescriptions are of the pharmaceutical kind. For example, ask any cardio and he will tell you that a jog a day will keep the Lipitor away.

And this is the value to society of having more doctors for our people, which this bill seeks to train.

I vote ‘Yes’ Mr. President.