Gratitude to PBBM’s No Balance Billing

We had been through aneurysm once already, that sudden brain attack at the start of Holy Week in 2023 when my sister in law Naomi Agnes C. Basco, now a retired government employee, almost lost her life and our family lost all savings on her brain surgery at St. Luke’s QC. We got through that. We figured we were past the worst of it. Her immediate family sought help everywhere, guarantee letters, donations, sold whatever we could, borrowed what we couldn’t, and told ourselves this was the price of keeping her alive. Since a family has no other option, we paid it all without complaining.

It wasn’t the worst we’d had. Follow-up checkups turned up two more aneurysms, now in her abdominal aorta, growing to a size where one rupture meant almost certain death. Her cardiologist in San Jose Del Monte City, Bulacan was blunt: this was a surgical issue, and soon. He had looked carefully at the scans over a number of visits and each time the measurements crept upwards his tone became more urgent. He referred her to the one place built exactly for this kind of fight, the Philippine Heart Center.

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Naomi and our niece Sheenalyn C.Gayyad went there , steeling themselves for yet another financial collapse. No political or personal intercessions, just a normal patient with a doctor’s recommendation applying for admission desperately like all the other ones. Our family had nothing left to lose and still everything to lose. We had already used up our savings for the brain surgery; there was no second reserve to tap this time.

At the Heart Center, Sheenalyn sat with a medical social worker named Marianne Logenio, who carefully went through every document, every detail of our situation — income records, previous hospital bills, proof of retirement, anything that could help the hospital understand exactly where we stood. That April, Chief Agnes L. Balid of the Social Services Division issued Naomi a white card so that she could receive free consultations while the larger case was under review. Her Green Card came through in June – Lifetime Member status as an emergency case under PhilHealth’s No Balance Billing coverage. That one piece of paper is the reason our family isn’t buried in debt today.

She was admitted on June 27 to a charity ward, with thirty other patients, spotless, fully air-conditioned, in the fourth-floor annex building staffed by some of the best cardiac specialists in the country. Nothing like the crowded, overwhelmed charity wards we had prepared ourselves for. It was neat and quiet and obviously intended for patients like herself.

But her aneurysms were already 7 centimeters, beyond the 4-centimeter mark that would have allowed for a more scheduled, less urgent approach. So the doctors moved fast. An angioplasty on July 15 removed a blockage that no one expected to see. Two days later, a twelve-hour operation revealed not two, but multiple aneurysms extending toward her spine, all of which were excised and replaced by a graft. The medical team did a surgical marathon in what must have been an exhausting day for them.

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Naomi struggled in the post operation but she was already in recovery and able to communicate with signals. And then there was a leak, her heart failed and we lost her August 1.By then, the hospital bill had already soared to over ₱3.1 million.

Let me tell you something, and tell you true. We did not get a miracle. We lost her to our family.” No policy, no government program, can take away that kind of grief, and we won’t pretend otherwise. No bill has a line item that measures what a Husband , sisters, brothers meant to those who loved her. But in that grief, something happened that we didn’t think we could be grateful for in that moment, but we were. No one ever asked us how we would pay. Never a cashier gave us a bill we could not carry. We were told, no-nonsense, that everything was covered. The angioplasty, the twelve hour surgery, the graft, the days in the ICU, the doctors’ fees, everything. The P3.1 million that would have destroyed us as St. Luke’s QC already did to us before , didn’t land on our shoulders again.

That’s what President Marcos’s Zero Balance Billing policy did for our family.” And now looking back around her charity ward mates before, the thirty other heart patients, their families just like ours, in a clean, modern, fully equipped floor of the Philippine Heart Center – I knew that this was not a special favor extended to us. This was just the system working exactly as it was intended. Each of those families was being saved from the same financial ruin we had already tasted once before. I watched other family members walk that same hall and make the same worried phone calls that we once had, and I knew that whatever happened in their own case, at least the hospital bill would not be what broke them after.

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We are told over and over to be patient with our taxes, that they go somewhere. I saw in the hospital where some of people’s taxes went. It went to that ward. To Marianne Logenio’s meticulous casework. To Chief Balid’s approval. To a graft put into my sister-in-law’s aorta by a surgical team that never once mentioned money. It went into the air-conditioning that kept thirty patients comfortable, into the diagnostic equipment that caught a hidden blockage before it became fatal, into the quiet competence of nurses who checked on her through the night without ever once bringing up a balance due.

This is what No Balance Billing and its expansion under PBBM’s directive really looks like on the ground — not a policy line in a briefing, but a family standing at a nurse’s station, hearing “wala na kayong babayaran” (you don’t have to pay anything) instead of a debt that would follow for years.

Naomi didn’t survive her fight. But because of this program, our family did not have to fight a second battle against debt in addition to grief. We were allowed to grieve only for her, not for our finances, our home, our future as well.

On behalf of Naomi, our family, and the thirty other charity patients who shared that ward with her, we would like to express our gratitude to President Bongbong Marcos, PhilHealth, and all the doctors and social workers at the Philippine Heart Center and other public hospitals across the country for ensuring that the expense of attempting to save a life was never the reason we were unable to do so. (end)