"It was not financial scrutiny."
We have heard about the recent skirmish in the Senate between Senators Franklin Drilon and Bong Go over the increase in bed capacities of several hospitals nationwide. Drilon decried that the bill would impose additional financial burden on the national government.
The news coverage and commentaries were heavily skewed to prop up Drilon, making him appear to be sharp and eagle-eyed, at the expense of Bong Go, who was made to appear unprepared or wanting to avoid scrutiny when he requested to end deliberations after many hours of being interpellated. Pundits had a field day saying that Bong Go was trying to take the easy way out when he requested that, after being grilled for hours, the matter be voted on instead.
At the Senate hearing yesterday, after the dust had settled, Drilon suggested means to fund the bill. Bong Go thanked Drilon for the suggestion and said that he is all for whatever would be of help to the people.
It appears that all is well. Compromise has been reached. The bill would be passed after all. But here is my take on the matter.
The bill is the Senate form of a bill from the lower house which had already been unanimously approved. It is not an unusual bill that merits the attention it has been receiving, as bills of this nature are commonplace. They are routinely passed.
But Drilon felt that he could score pogi points against Bong Go with this matter, and so he proceeded to make use of his status and experience as a veteran lawmaker to bamboozle Bong Go.
Drilon was showing off when he asked Bong Go about the Mandanas ruling which gave additional funding to local government units. Watching from the sidelines, for me, this was not about financial scrutiny; this was bullying.
You can just imagine what happened. Drilon asked Go, “Are you familiar with the Mandanas ruling?” Go might not have the matter at the tip of his fingertips right away so he asked his staff to provide him the information. At this point you can imagine Drilon looking at the gallery, preening, as if to say “Kitamo, di pala alam ang Mandanas ruling, eh ako alam ko”.
Let’s look at the meat of Drilon’s complaint. A portion of the bill sought to transfer the administration and funding of certain hospitals to the Department of Health from the local governments. It is called “renationalization.”
Drilon said that the bill would become a financial burden to the national government, and that the local governments have enough money to shoulder these expenses. This is not a fair assessment. A public hospital is a public service of such magnitude that requires more experience and more funding than what any local government could afford on its own.
Let’s compare this to roads. There are multi-lane national highways open to anyone who wishes to use them and there is no issue that they need to be funded by the national government; they are simply too expensive for local governments. These are major roads. But local governments can also build roads that serve their constituent communities, and they can allocate funds for this, but even if they want to, local governments simply do not have the capacity to fund national highways, and neither should they be required to do so.
There are hospitals that need to be big in terms of services, such as secondary or tertiary. They are too big to be left in the hands of local governments alone as they have limited funds. The national government has to step in to carry the burden; it is bigger, it has more ways of creating funds, it has better access to more health professionals.
Drilon could have, at the outset, been more helpful. He only became cooperative after the recess of the Senate and the resetting of the deliberations. It appears that cooler heads had intervened and injected some sense in the discussions.
But maybe that was all there was to it —an opportunity for Drilon to have his sound bites picked up by a media that revels in the antics of show-offs.
There is nothing wrong with increasing hospital bed capacity. There is nothing wrong with renationalizing hospitals of a certain size. There is nothing wrong with proposing these bills. But there is definitely something wrong if someone finds fault with all these, just so he could thump his chest.
Drilon is one of the stalwarts of the Liberal Party and represents what is wrong with his party of holier-than-thou characters. They have this attitude that they know better and that they are beyond reproach. From their pulpits, It feels like they are always talking down to us.
Bong Go, on the other hand, represents the everyman, the ordinary you and me. Step into his shoes during the debate, and you will perhaps see where I am coming from: Here you are only wanting to increase hospital capacity, and then here comes Drilon just relishing the chance to prop himself up, playing to the audience. This is so wrong on so many levels.
This also turns off the MASA, a word that might be outlandish to Drilon and company.
