Disconnect

A message from a doctor-friend who is in the thick of the fight against COVID-19 reads: “Our health system is on the verge of collapsing. So many nurses are leaving or planning to leave. Unya kining DBM (Department of Budget and Management) wala pa gyu’y budget next year for their SRA (special risk allowance). Please check the DBM budget Atty., kulbaan ko ani.”

The DBM is the primary agency of the Executive department that is in charge of preparing and submitting to Congress the proposed national budget. Ultimately, Congress and the president are the powers that decide on the national budget, also known as the National Expenditure Program (NEP).

I checked for any press release from the government about the 2022 proposed national budget and I found one published on August 23. It says the budget proposal is guided by a three-pillared strategy of “building resilience amidst the pandemic, sustaining the momentum towards recovery, and continuing the legacy of infrastructure development.”

It also says that the proposed budget of ?5.024 trillion for 2022 is 11.5% higher than this year's budget, with the top five allocations given to Education (?773.6 billion), Public Works (?686.1 billion), Interior and Local Government (?250.4 billion), Health (?242 billion), and National Defense (?222 billion).

A couple more motherhood statements into the press release and I still could not find what I was looking for. It was a press release, I know. I should not be expecting more than a bunch of wordy generalities; phrases such as, “the 2022 NEP was carefully crafted to provide the necessary funding requirements to support the country’s resilience against the COVID-19 pandemic, to sustain the trajectory of economic growth, and to continue the legacy of infrastructure development.”

Looking for specific items on health, I read about an allocation of ?45.4 billion for the purchase of COVID-19 booster shots for a target 93.798 million Filipinos; that’s ?484 per person. Then there was mention about allocating ?983 million to establish the Virology Science and Technology Institute of the Philippines. The press release, however, didn’t mention if these proposed expenditures are either part of the health budget or are separate expenditures.

This ambiguity is unfortunate because looking at the health department’s budget this year at ?212 billion, we could not really say if its proposed budget next year of ?242 billion represents a substantial increase. What’s clear in the reports by mainstream media is that the Department of Health (DOH) wanted ?73.9 billion more, on top of the ?242 billion that the DBM has submitted to Congress.

So what’s relevant about this “budget cut” aside from we’re talking billions? By not giving the DOH the amount it deems adequate in order to respond effectively to this pandemic, it means turning down the proposed ?50.4 billion to cover health workers’ special risk allowances and hazard pay, as well as for hiring of additional health workers.

In a still-raging pandemic where it has been repeatedly said by experts that contact tracing and testing are instrumental in containing COVID-19 and saving our fragile economy, the 2022 NEP budget also means a budget way less than what could support the rate of contact tracing and testing that the country’s main COVID-19 testing center, the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, has recommended.

My doctor-friend has a reason to be “kulbaan” which is Cebuano for “apprehensive”. He has seen the horrors of the coronavirus pandemic playing out in emergency rooms and ICU wards. He now watches in perplexion that awful disconnect between what experts like him are seeing and what the government is doing.