Message of His Excellency Benigno S. Aquino III, President of the Philippines, to the Sixteenth Congress of the Philippines on the National Budget for Fiscal Year 2015 UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE. I have seen how a broken healthcare system affects our people. Most of them pay for their own treatment because they have no adequate health insurance coverage. Most of them have not seen a medical professional in their entire life because there are no health facilities in their communities. Due to lack of proper health care, mothers have died due to absence of prenatal and postnatal care, and children, too, even before entering school. Our health care system was in this state when we were vigorously demanding for reform in our sin tax law and our reproductive health system. With your help in Congress and with our determination, the reproductive health bill was passed, and the sin tax reform law continues to generate additional revenues—much more than the projected—allowing us to provide adequate and better preventive health services, protect our people from diseases, and most importantly, provide them with financial protection. In 2015, we will cover more than 15.4 million indigents under our PhilHealth to significantly reduce out-of-pocket health expenses of our poor. My administration will sustain the 100-percent coverage rate of indigent families identified through the National Housing Targeting Survey for Poverty Reduction. With a P13.1-billion allocation for Health Facilities Enhancement Program, we will upgrade 1,242 barangay health stations, 587 rural health units/city health centers, 128 LGU hospitals, 19 DOH hospitals, and 11 treatment and rehabilitation centers. As we build better facilities, we will likewise provide more healthcare providers on the ground by deploying additional 398 doctors, 480 dentists, 12,540 nurses, and 5,749 midwives. At the end of day, we are hiring more health workers and building better facilities, because we want to prevent our people from getting sick and from paying for more costly treatment and cure. Along with providing better facilities and more healthcare providers, the Department of Health will ensure that 95 in every 100 of children get full immunization and that 8 in every 10 of pregnant women deliver in health facilities. With a P3.3 billion allocation, we will immunize 2.2 million children and provide pneumococcal vaccines to 1.4 million senior citizens and 429,000 infants. We allocated P3.3 billion to implement the Reproductive Health Law, especially in providing vitamin A supplements for children below 5 years old and making available family planning commodities to women as well as services to local government units. Read full message here: gov.ph/2014/07/30/2015-budget-message-of-president-aquino/
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 14:29:37 +0000