'Medicare portability' for Fil-Ams

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo It is supposed to be a win-win situation, with both the United States and the Philippine governments benefiting from it, but most of all, the Filipino-American Medicare beneficiaries who have contributed heard-earned money. Many Fil-Am retirees, medical professionals and advocates in the US have joined the “US Medicare in the Philippines Campaign” to convince the US Congress and President Barack Obama to allow Medicare coverage in the Philippines. They are lobbying for the passage of the US...

Read More

Breaking the culture of silence, deafness

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo Speaking at a Vatican gathering, newly installed Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio “Chito” Tagle delivered his opening salvo thus: “The so-called crisis of the clergy unfolding these past years is immense in scope. It includes allegations of sexual misconduct, suspicions about the clergy’s handling of money, accusations of misuse of authority, inappropriate lifestyle and a host of other things....

Read More

OFWs stricken ill

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo Nanay Flor Tejada, for years an overseas Filipino worker in Hong Kong, lost her daughter Armyn, also a Hong Kong OFW, to breast cancer in 2008. The following year, her other daughter, Nene, also a Hong Kong OFW, followed suit because of colon cancer. Both Armyn and Nene died in Hong Kong. After Nene’s passing, Nanay Flor went home to the Philippines to care for a son who was diagnosed to have liver cancer and eventually died. Not long after, Nanay Flor herself found out that she had lung cancer....

Read More

Cancer and medical tourism

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo While health and tourism officials as well as health institutions are doing their best to promote medical tourism in the Philippines by way of drawing foreign patients to avail of Filipino medical expertise, Chinese hospitals are beating them through aggressive advertising right in our own home ground. This is especially so in the cancer department. But this is getting ahead of the story. The third week of January being national Cancer Consciousness Week and Feb. 4 being World Cancer Day,...

Read More