Sen. Nancy Binay blasted the removal of the funding item allotted for cancer treatment in the 2022 national budget with no clear support for cancer patients.
Questioning the Duterte administration and the Department of Health’s action seen to affect thousands of cancer patients, Binay bemoaned the move seen to hit thousands of cancer patients relying on state-run hospitals for regular treatment of the killer disease.
The senator slammed the removal of the line item for the country’s cancer fund for 2022 by the Department of Health, saying it was a “step back” after Congress “had gone through a lot of hoops to fully empower the national cancer control program.”
In a news statement, the lawmaker lamented that “the DOH should have taken our cue when we allocated P620 million last year for cancer. Batas ‘yan, at long-term priority. Instead of moving forward this is a step back that we should correct. When survival matters, you don’t make lifelines invisible.”
Binay recalled that the P620-million cancer fund for 2021 was only included during the bicameral conference for the national budget. It consists of the P500-million Cancer Control Program fund and the P120-million Cancer Assistance fund.
Vowing to rectify the misstep by filing an amendment during the Senate’s deliberations on the DOH’s proposed budget for 2022, the senator recalled that the Cancer Coalition of the Philippines earlier sounded the alarm over the removal of the cancer fund line item in next year’s budget.
She cited suggestions that instead of a line item, the DOH had subsumed the National Integrated Cancer Control Program, including cancer medicines for children, and the Cancer Assistance Fund under the funding item for non-communicable diseases (NCD). Butch Fernandez