Given the caliber of its senators, only a handful of whom deserve their title, a grandiose edifice costing nearly P32 billion to house them is an outright absurdity.
The Senate is building a new home on an 18,320-square-meter lot in Navy Village, Fort Bonifacio, Taguig City, featuring four 11-floor towers and three basements, with at least 1,200 parking spaces.
The original construction cost was pegged at P8.9 billion, with completion expected by 2021, but it remains unfinished, and the cost has escalated to four times that amount.
The structure, nonetheless, is perfect for a new public hospital as reparation for the mortal sin of Congress, in which the Senate played a role: the attempt to extract P89.9 billion from the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth), earmarked for healthcare.
Clarita Carlos, a University of the Philippines professor and former political adviser to the President, has a compelling proposal, one that could rehabilitate the Senate’s battered public standing while addressing the healthcare crisis in a single stroke.
Carlos questioned what she called a “walang kuwenta” (useless) project and floated the idea of repurposing the building as a public tertiary hospital comparable to the Philippine General Hospital (PGH).
At the moment, the premier government hospital’s emergency room has exceeded capacity by 400 percent, with more than 300 patients crammed into a facility designed for only 75.
The Department of Health (DoH) has admitted the need for the country to triple its current capacity to accommodate the rising number of poor patients.
Public hospitals are overcrowded, with the familiar sight of patients waiting in hallways before being admitted.
The country’s doctor-to-patient and nurse-to-patient ratios are well below World Health Organization standards.
PGH serves more than 600,000 patients yearly. Despite this, health workers remain troubled by the persistent shortage of frontliners and clinical utility staff.
Private hospitals also suffer from a nursing staff shortage, with many healthcare workers opting for better-paying opportunities abroad.
Efforts to keep Filipino doctors and nurses from leaving should be backed by bold reforms, starting with the transfer of the Senate building to the Department of Health as a powerful symbolic gesture.
As early as 2021, there were calls to suspend construction of the Senate building, as proponents of shelving the project argued that the billions of pesos should be realigned to fund a hospital to boost the government’s Covid-19 response.
A senator responded to Carlos, saying the conversion “definitely will not happen,” and explained that the chamber was already working to cut costs and remove items deemed unnecessary.
Still, the allocation of scarce public funds between prestigious infrastructure and urgent social services remains a source of public anguish.
At P33 billion, the Senate building rivals the cost of constructing and fully equipping a world-class public hospital that could serve hundreds of thousands of indigent Filipinos annually.
Critics argue that a legislature that rents office space can continue doing so, while millions of Filipinos still lack access to basic tertiary healthcare.