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ON the
front page of this issue, a BusinessMirror editor on a
trip to Pakistan recounts her experience in buying
over-the-counter drugs to check out the reputed big
difference between those and their equivalent in the
Philippines, which has the dubious distinction of having
the priciest medicines in the world.
From Lyn
Resurreccion’s account, a popular brand of paracetamol
costs more than P2 a tablet in the Philippines, while a
generic brand costs only the equivalent of less than 40
centavos in Pakistan.
Another
tablet, an alendronate that is taken to prevent
osteoporosis when calcium could not be absorbed by
certain patients, costs more than P800 in Manila. In
Pakistan? The same brand name, the same everything,
costs only the equivalent a little more than half.
Another
interesting discovery she made: many pharmacies in
Pakistan dispense only locally produced generic drugs.
The foreign-branded alendronate bought for P400-plus in
Karachi only costs P87 a tablet if a generic. Or only
one-tenth of the P800 for a foreign-branded tablet in
Manila.
These
are just some examples. Imagine, then, the impact on
hundreds of thousands of Filipino households that now
must set aside a big chunk of their monthly budgets for
medicine—especially maintenance drugs crucial to the
well-being and survival of certain members of the
family, like the hypertensives, diabetics and/or those
with recurring pulmonary ailments or ailing hearts.
This
illustrates clearly why so many powerful forces are
fighting tooth and nail, even now, to subvert the
cheap-medicines bill passed by Congress, even before
President Arroyo has signed it into law. At the height
of the debates on the bill, Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr. of
Makati City, who has tangled with friends and foes alike
on the issue, had aptly framed the importance of the
cheap-drugs law. It is but one of the shrinking options
left, he said, to help ease the plight of the majority
who are poor; and depriving the ordinary folk of this
weapon is almost like killing them.
The
impact of the cheap-drugs initiative on ordinary
citizens’ household budgets comes to mind when one
contemplates the point of some experts about the need
for a firmer, more creative labor policy that gives
workers all possible sorts of relief so that they do not
rely too heavily on simple wage increases. For the
longest time, government economists have faulted labor
groups for insisting on filing “unrealistic,”
across-the-board wage-increase petitions each year,
especially right before Labor Day. The state experts
say—often backed by independent economists—that
unconscionable or too-large additions to the minimum
wage would have inflationary effects, and eventually may
harm workers more than help them. Granted. That is why,
in lieu of legislated wage increases that are often
hostage to politics, the law mandated the regional wage
boards to serve the purpose of vetting the labor
petitions, considering as criteria the local economies
and conditions where such petitions emanate. And yet, in
the final analysis, the workers automatically look to
wage increases for relief only because they cannot see
these coming from any other direction.
Indeed,
the economist at the Palace recently revived talk of
“nonwage” relief measures in order to help workers cope
with the impact of rising prices of transport, household
fuel, food staples like rice and bread, and, of course,
medicine. Yet, the truth of the matter is that, in the
past several years, all talk of “nonwage” relief has
been more token than substantive aid. In other countries
where workers are taxed heavily and compliance is
enforced strictly, the state draws obedience because it
provides for subsidies for most of the citizens’ basic
needs: medical care, whether routine examinations or for
emergency or tertiary care; education that sometimes
even includes continuing professional development; food
and clothing; and subsidized transportation.
In the
Philippines, the signals are all mixed. Over mass media,
the Executive harangues every other power entity about
how electricity rates are gouging pockets of the poor,
yet taxes indigenous fuel heavily by way of hefty
royalties on the output from Malampaya.
The
government keeps saying the poor must be helped with
their food budgets, yet, the government subsidies are
limited to cities like those in Metro Manila, while
communities in the countryside must reel from high
staple prices.
The list
of “antipoor” pricing of services goes on and on: from
the government hospitals that are barely funded and thus
provide primitive relief to the ailing; to schools where
tuition is free, but which can only be reached if a
child or his/her parents fork over prohibitive sums for
a tricycle ride because the roads are impassable to any
other type of vehicle; to legal documents and other
government paper requirements that now charge such hefty
fees as to discourage the poor.
And yet,
at the end of the day, the smart ones in the government
know very well that if they had the political will and
creativity, there are so many measures that can be done
to ease the burden of ordinary folk without heeding the
clamor for huge pay raises. People rely heavily on
their paycheck because there’s nothing else to look
forward to. But if they could get assistance in terms of
food, transportation, schooling, medicine or any other
basic expense where socially indexed formulas can be
adopted, they wouldn’t have to fret no end over the
shrinking paycheck.
It was
done with the cheap-medicines bill, no matter the
carping of critics. For the longest time everyone has
known that medicines are much more expensive in the
Philippines because, for one thing, multinational drug
companies have strong control of the industry, including
pricing; and that they add their public-relations
expenses such as bringing doctors to conferences here
and abroad to their expenses.
So much
so that, per an Asean survey, the retail prices of
medicines in fellow Asean members Indonesia, Malaysia
and Thailand are 40 percent to 70 percent lower than in
the Philippines. And yet, the complexities
notwithstanding, Congress passed the cheap-medicines
bill.
Maybe
it’s time to go beyond lip service in the other areas
and determine just what the government and the private
sector alike can do to make life a little easier for the
working class. |
