A CENTRAL feature of our health sector’s priors before the pandemic was this. Bumbling and shambling — and woefully underfunded — the health sector was, but the nation managed to live with that with very little disruption. After all, no administration in our contemporary history has funded the health sector according to the spending benchmarks set by the United Nations. And no government in our contemporary history has made the health sector a real state priority. Never has there been a health expenditure that breached 2 percent of the country’s GDP.
And this one, too. Bumbling and shambling the head of the health bureaucracy was, but the nation just brushed aside his gross inadequacies and many failings. It survived, even with the feckless Francisco Duque 3rd as Health secretary because the public health crises we knew (from dengue to resurgent TB) had parameters we were familiar with. After all, (with the exception of Manuel Dayrit), we never had a Health secretary with a deep theoretical and practical grasp of what the sector needed. There is no marked difference, say, in the level of incompetence between today’s health bosses and the Dengvaxia abettors cum health bosses under Mr. Benigno Aquino 3rd.
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