Checks and balances

The Economist has done it again. One of their columnists made an observation that betrayed a lack of appreciation and understanding of Filipinos and our way of doing things. He wrote:

“The Philippines is a country of immense potential. But a family feud between the Marcos and Duterte clans is making its politics unpredictable  – and holding the country back. Unlike Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos and Sara Duterte detest each other. This makes governing the Philippines rather harder than it should be.”

First of all, the family feud is good for us. Given our inability to operationalize the constitutional ideal of checks and balances, a family feud among our ruling family dynasties is a good thing. It is our assurance we are not being robbed blind by the ruling political families. Given the absence of strong institutions the way they have it in the West, this is how we do checks and balances.

And this family feud has done us a lot of good already. It stopped VP Sara Duterte from getting the confidential funds she was asking for herself. Because the allies of the Marcos-Romualdez family in Congress raised such a fuss, VP Sara was forced to drop her request for a total of P650 million in confidential funds – P500 million for the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and P150 million for the Department of Education (DepEd) – in the proposed 2024 budget.

She doesn’t need those funds. Neither the OVP nor DepEd had such funds before. If the family feud wasn’t on, she would have received those funds which aren’t even audited by COA the way other government expenditures are audited.

Indeed, when BBM and Sara were lovey-dovey after winning the election, he gave her P221.4 million in confidential funds out of his own budget. Sara spent everything within 19 days.

The other thing that came to light because of the feud is that Duterte’s son, who was a congressman in the last three years of the Duterte presidency, managed to get P51 billion in pork barrel funds. No other congressman received anywhere as large an allocation as he did. Demands for him to explain how the money was spent were ignored. Hopefully, because of the feud, COA will not be intimidated to do its constitutional duty to investigate.

So, the Marcos-Duterte family feud does not negatively or positively affect our potential by making our politics unpredictable. Our politics is dysfunctional, not unpredictable. We can easily predict how our political leaders will mess up the country. If at all, the family feud puts a check on potential abuses one family may have in mind. It may have a limited ability to keep all parties honest because of the threat of public disclosure.

When there is political peace among the ruling families, the country gets royally screwed. I know that is difficult for writers from The Economist to understand, but that’s the nature of the beast. I wish we had a more honest political environment that abides by the ideals in the Constitution. But we have what we have unless a majority of Filipinos decide that enough is enough.

It is actually enjoyable to read the trolls of both families trying to smear each other on social media. That gives you a feeling that all’s well. While our country will go nowhere fast, we know they are at least unable to steal the way they are used to.

Unethical doctors

Doctors must always be worthy of their patient’s trust. That’s basic. Once that trust is lost, the outcome for the patient gets murky. That’s why there is nothing so appalling as physicians caught with their fingers in the drug company cookie jar. That automatically presumes they don’t have the interest of their patients as their highest concern.

So, we have a few thousand doctors nationwide involved in an unethical marketing scheme with a drug company. Doctors are being rewarded for prescribing the drugs being sold by a certain drug company, which is also owned by other doctors, a public hearing revealed. The rewards are substantial, enough to convince doctors to specifically prescribe a particular brand or write an unnecessary prescription for.

According to some senators, free expensive foreign trips, flashy new cars and outright cash are being lavished on some doctors.  It has proven very effective. A senator said the sales of the hardly known drug company astonishingly grew from P1 billion in 2016 to P5 billion in 2019, a huge leap in sales.

Health Secretary Ted Herbosa reminded the country’s health professionals and personnel that accepting gifts, grants, or any emoluments from pharmaceutical companies in exchange for a favor is “unethical.” Yet, during a public hearing, the head of the drug company admitted the practice.

“We are giving incentives and, shall I say, support to our doctors for them to include us as a brand for their generic prescriptions... We give them continuing medical education, locally and abroad. And sometimes we also provide them with the clinic equipment,” the drug firm chairman, also a doctor, explained.

Check your doctor’s prescriptions. If there is a product of the drug company in question, change your doctor. He or she cannot be trusted to put your life above his or her wallet. Your life depends on getting a doctor who can be trusted to look after your welfare above everything else.

The Professional Regulatory Commission should investigate and strip the licenses of offending physicians to protect the public. But knowing how things work in our country, that will never happen. And we know why.

We can only hope the Bureau of Internal Revenue will audit all their tax returns for possible unreported income from this scheme.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on X @boochanco