The Real Cost of Healthcare
The healthcare system in the Philippines can be both frustratingly inaccessible and surprisingly expensive. But long before I understood these gaps professionally, I encountered them through the people I met during my community nursing days. Sometimes, the hardest part of being poor is having to choose between getting better and putting food on the table. During my first community nursing exposure, I met a grandmother who worked as a laundrywoman and was the breadwinner of her family. She was experiencing incontinence but struggled to seek medical attention. A hospital visit meant losing a day's income, spending money on transportation and food, and leaving her family without their usual source of support. For her, getting medical care meant risking her family's next meal. That encounter taught me something no textbook could fully explain: access to healthcare is also a question of time, livelihood, dignity, and survival. When Poverty Stops Being a Statistic My next immersion b...