Parasites in Barong: A Commentary on Philippine Corruption and the Healthcare Crisis

Credits to the rightful owner of this photo

The abusive conquerors from the colonial era left our land decades ago.

Now, we are told we are free.

But are we?

My day usually consists of going to school, studying, and going home. I learn in my studies that the hospital is a sanctuary for the wounded; everyone has rights to healthcare — however, all of that belief shattered when I saw this old, homeless woman walking in an agonizingly slow pace down the pavement. Fresh and untreated bright red blood was trailing down from her scalp to her chin. Her eyes looked like she couldn’t see anything from being extremely swollen. She was dragging a heavy rice sack bulging with plastic and metal scraps.

When I looked where she was coming from, I realized that she was walking away from the emergency room of a private hospital. I think that it was the nearest place for help at the time she got her injuries.

I find myself having not the ability to move while I got an earful of the sack she carried reverberates plastic bottles being dragged across the rough cement pavement. The sack she carried almost looked like it represents the weight she carries as a person. The swell and dried blood around her eye was a brutal manifestation of the country’s cruelty. Where was this so-called “Sanctuary for the poor”?

In nursing, we often study how to feel the person empathetically and what could be factors to certain cases. This time, it was a real-life incident outside the routine clinical setting.

Our conquerors never truly left. They only changed their skin colors and started speaking our own language. These are what I call “homegrown tyrants”. These politicians treat governance as if it is family business. When politics and business sit at the same table, it relays consequences that are catastrophic for innocent citizens. Just like a study from 2022 emphasized — politicians and business elites are almost synonymous. They explained how the elite manipulate legal and economic systems for personal gain, resulting in a mass economic drought for the majority.

Photo from Medical Action Group (2025)

Studies regarding health economics in the Philippines reveal that nearly half of all healthcare financing in the country includes out-of-pocket medical expenses. According to research on Catastrophic Health Expenditures (CHE), medical emergencies for the regular citizen almost acts like an instant ‘impoverishing shock’ that puts people into severe debt and worse — bankruptcy. When public health funds are drained by corruption of people supposed to serve us, the poor are left to die untreated, or spend every single peso they have on commercialized medical care until their pockets are completely wiped out. For me, it’s a sad reality of how a single sickness turns a working citizen into homeless mendicants.

Some may even ask,

“What about public hospitals? Aren’t they free of charge?”

They’re almost correct. But the bitter reality of this nation is that “free healthcare” is only kept alive on paper or media because healthcare funds are often siphoned away by corruption that results in the facility’s chronic suffocation. These public hospitals lack the most basic supplies. Overworked, yet underfunded. Also, for a homeless bleeding person, it’s quite an impossible luxury to be navigating for a public hospital when the nearest help is right in front of her.

In a country run like a corporation, everything becomes a commodity — even human survival and healthcare.

I sit there frozen;

and I can’t help but wonder.

Was she turned away by a triage system that saw a financial liability, or did she carry a poverty so heavy that she believed she had no right to be healed?

Either way, if you think about it, our healthcare is not a sanctuary for the poor, it’s a marketplace. And in this market, the poor are left out to bleed out on the pavement.

The pain inside my heart couldn’t keep itself from showing. Running down my face were my tears as I realized that I won’t be able to know or hear her story. Similarly, millions of Filipinos suffer because of systemic failure and can not speak for themselves, therefore, it aches me that there are millions of unheard stories that represent the brutal reality of the Philippines.