For years, Anthony Leachon, healthcare advocate, has spoken in television interviews, Senate hearings, and court filings with the urgency of a doctor delivering bad news to a patient’s family.
During a recent appearance on DAILY TRIBUNE’s Straight Talk, his diagnosis of the Philippine healthcare system sounded more personal than political.
“Our healthcare system is dying or moribund,” he said. “The patient is in the ICU and about to die.”
The words were not delivered theatrically.
Leachon spoke as a physician who has spent decades in hospitals and government health institutions, witnessing overcrowded wards, unpaid hospital bills, exhausted healthcare workers, and patients sinking into debt after a single illness.
For him, the controversy over billions of pesos in healthcare funds is not just about numbers in a budget spreadsheet.
It is about Filipinos choosing between chemotherapy and tuition fees, between dialysis and groceries, between survival and bankruptcy.
The longtime health advocate has become one of the loudest critics of the government’s handling of PhilHealth funds, particularly the transfer of reserve funds to the National Treasury.
He argues that the money — sourced largely from sin taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, vaping products and sugary drinks — was legally intended to strengthen universal healthcare and reduce out-of-pocket medical expenses for Filipinos.
Instead, he says, the country’s healthcare system was weakened at the very moment ordinary citizens needed it most.
Leachon often compares the Philippines to neighboring countries where healthcare costs are significantly lower for patients.
In Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, Canada and the United Kingdom, he noted, citizens shoulder only a small portion, or none at all, of hospitalization costs.
Filipinos fear killer med bills
In the Philippines, families still carry much of the burden themselves. That burden, he said, is crushing the middle class.
“The middle class is the new poor,” Leachon warned during the interview. “One catastrophic illness and you become poor.”
The issue became deeply personal for him after witnessing how other countries operate their healthcare systems through his own family.
He pointed to the irony that the Philippines, whose national hero, José Rizal, was himself a physician, continues to struggle with healthcare access decades after universal healthcare became a national aspiration.
He described a healthcare system battered by doctor and nurse migration, underfunded public hospitals, and what he called a “brain drain” of medical professionals leaving the country for better opportunities abroad.
Yet his fiercest criticism remains directed at officials he believes enabled the diversion of healthcare funds.
During the interview, Leachon repeatedly mentioned then Finance Secretary, now Executive Secretary Ralph Recto, accusing him of playing a key role in policies that enabled the transfer of PhilHealth reserve funds.
At the heart of the crisis is the near-fatal bleeding of PhilHealth’s funds. Under Recto, the Department of Finance ordered PhilHealth to remit P89.9 billion in unused reserve funds to the National Treasury to finance Unprogrammed Appropriations (UA).
The excuse given was that these were “excess funds,” which Leachon said was absurd, given the visible strain on public hospitals.
The Supreme Court later intervened, ordering the return of the P60 billion already transferred and halting the remittance of the remaining P29.9 billion, after ruling that the policy violated the Constitution and the UHC Act.
That it required a Supreme Court ruling to restore funds legally belonging to the Filipino sick and vulnerable speaks volumes about how dangerously close the system came to flatlining and how cavalier the decision-makers were about playing with people’s lives.
He also criticized lawmakers who supported the move, arguing that healthcare money should never have been treated as “excess funds.”
For Leachon, the Supreme Court’s intervention ordering the return of part of the transferred funds was validation that healthcare allocations are not ordinary government savings.
“Amin ‘yan (That’s ours),” he said of the PhilHealth money.
“Wala kayong ambag diyan (You contributed nothing to that).”
Despite his sharp criticisms, Leachon described his advocacy less as politics and more as a matter of civic responsibility.
He repeatedly called on Filipinos, especially doctors, professionals, and the middle class, to shun silence.
Many educated Filipinos understand the country’s healthcare failures but choose not to speak publicly about them, he lamented.
“We need moral courage,” he urged.
That call appears rooted in something deeper than policy debates.
Throughout the interview, Leachon returned to themes of citizenship, accountability, and national dignity.
He urged Filipinos to focus less on political noise and more on protecting healthcare and education for future generations.
Leachon has become an unlikely public crusader, part physician, part policy critic, part civic educator.