Lone Ranger Panlilio’s dare vs. the “poorman’s game”

By Gerry Garcia

CAUSES which generally compel some hospitals to further detain healed patients in their custody for their failure to pay the costs of their stay . . . are most often financial and understandably, relevant to the concerned hospitals’ stable and continued operations. Hospitals can’t function without the money for nurses’ and doctors’ pay and, much more, for patients’ medicines.

The people who most often could not comply with the hospital’s financial requirements, i.e., who can’t pay their debts to the hospital, are the poor and indigent folk.

And people like us, imbued with humanitarian spirit, tend to look down on the hospital’s policy of not releasing healed patients  because of unpaid hospital bills as some sort of blackmail. Or plain hostage-taking.

Situations like this, we think, are better addressed by the government, through the Department of Health in line with the government pro-poor agenda and its drive to minimize poverty in the country.

We perfectly understand the poor patient’s bewilderment who, finding himself unable to pay his bills, would soon find himself buried deeper in debts if he is detained longer in the hospital.

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The unprecedented election to Pampanga’s gubernatorial post of Catholic priest Fr. Ed Panlilio in an age of trapoism, they say, was triggered by his fellow-capampangans’ growing disdain for their province’s being tagged as the jueteng capital of the country. That’s why they opted to catapult Fr. Ed to the provincial governor’s throne because he’s in the same groove with their idol Bishop Oscar Cruz of the Lingayen-Dagupan diocese — number one crusader against jueteng.

The problem  now is whether he, the lone priest in Pampanga’s government can effectively lead his trapo-infested followers to a devastating triumph over his losing  competitor Lilia Pineda’s husband Bong, alleged jueteng lord.

Beneficiaries of jueteng, the “poorman’s game”, are most of Pinoyland’s impoverished masses, government officials, even police and other military officers getting their shares from jueteng’s multi-billionaire lords. The country’s economic underpinnings are still in need of strengthening enough to rein in the impoverished masses. Short of this, you can’t stop jueteng.

(For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/here-and-there/)

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