SENATE President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto on Wednesday backed President Duterte’s decision to buy P19.1 billion worth of drugs and vaccines, the bulk of which—estimated at 80 percent—will be distributed to provincial health centers “to avoid spoilage.”
Duterte’s directive, which Recto described as a “purchase order,” is found in the President’s 36-page Budget Message for 2020, which served as the cover letter to the voluminous documents detailing the proposed P4.1-trillion 2020 national budget sent to Congress early this week.
Recto noted that the Presidential message sent to Congress had directed that 80 percent of 2020 medical purchases “shall be allocated to provinces where the incidence of diseases is highest.”
The Senate President Pro Tempore acknowledged that Duterte, in imposing the earmark, made the “right drug prescription.”
He pointed out that “by adopting this new distribution formula, government is saying that it has learned its lesson and that there will no longer be a repeat of drugs spoiling in Department of Health [DOH] warehouses.”
Recto suggested that this new formula should now be the norm. “Kung ang gamot ay dapat fast-acting, ganoon din dapat ang distribution nito [If a drug is meant to be fact-acting, so should its distribution be]. This rule in dispensing drugs is as old as the proverb ‘Aanhin pa ang damo, kung patay na ang kabayo [what’s the grass for, when the horse is dead]?’”
Kung ang gamot ay dapat fast-acting, ganoon din dapat ang distribution nito.
Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto
He expects that more stocks in the “government’s medicine cabinet,” will effectively reduce Filipino households’ “out-of-pocket” yearly expenditures for drugs, a whopping P187 billion in 2017.
In a statement, Recto recalled that the Commission on Audit (COA) earlier flagged the DOH’s large hoard of medicines, noting that the watchdog’s finding showed DOH had an end-2018 inventory of P18.5 billion worth of medicines, with P295 million worth “nearing expiry as of January this year.”
Still, Recto voiced confidence that the DOH leadership is now “competently handling” the drug distribution problem. “I know that Secretary [Francisco] Duque is now addressing this problem, and being an old hand at the DOH, he knows what to do. The good doctor will certainly not allow this wastage to happen during his watch,” he said.
For 2020, the total budget imputed to the DOH is P166.5 billion —broken down as P92.2 billion for the “DOH proper,” P67.4 billion in premium payments of sponsored sectors to the Philippine Health Insurance Corp., and other health agencies like the four Quezon City-based specialty hospitals, among others. He suggested that “if we use P166.5 billion as the reference figure, then about 12 percent of this amount will be for drugs, medicines and vaccines.”