SEN. Bong Go has urged the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) to intensify public awareness on health care benefits under the Universal Health Care (UHC) law.
The senator made the appeal on Sunday citing the death in August of a woman after giving birth along a sidewalk in Cebu City.
A nurse who was passing by helped her deliver her stillborn baby but the woman refused to be brought to the hospital due to financial constraints.
Go brought up the Cebu incident to highlight the “consequences of insufficient public awareness.”
The chairman of the Senate Committee on Health and Demography raised the need to keep Filipinos informed about government-supported health care options.
“Many Filipinos, even those directly enrolled in PhilHealth, remain unaware of the full scope of their entitlements,” Go said.
He said that “no Filipino should have to make life-and-death decisions out of fear of medical expenses.”
Lack of public awareness of health assistance programs “continues to put lives at risk.”
Go said that his office received in October a “commitment letter” from PhilHealth wherein it pledged to strengthen its information drive to educate Filipinos about the available benefits.
“This step is essential to bridging the critical knowledge gap in healthcare accessibility,” he said.
“It’s quite sad that there was such an incident like this. If the woman only knew that she could avail of medical services from the government, she and her unborn child could have been alive today,” Go said in Filipino.
Go reiterated the urgency of utilizing PhilHealth’s substantial budget to improve not only its services but also public education on the benefits supposedly covered by PhilHealth under UHC Act.
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