Your Partner in Health?: A Qualitative Study on the Struggles of Indigent Patients from Barangay Bagong Silangan, District 2, Quezon City in Availing PhilHealth Benefit Packages for COVID-19

Abstract

The most common notion of ensuring the health of individuals is to give them access to healthcare services. But since such healthcare services are not free, the aim has been to cover their costs whenever they utilize them. In the Philippines, this has been actualized through PhilHealth, which has made use of benefit packages that will cover the costs that would be incurred by individuals from utilizing healthcare services. For COVID-19 indigent patients, by the time they have availed of PhilHealth’s benefit packages, they had already undergone some processes that are ultimately not free, thus posing a problem for them who have “no visible means of income, or whose income is insufficient for the subsistence of his family.” This study’s goal is to uncover the struggles they experience in going through such process. Through the use of grounded theory, the processes in availing PhilHealth’s benefit packages for COVID-19 had been mapped out based on the narratives and experiences of indigent patients. As such, as indigent patients go through these process, struggles emerged. However, by using Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower, it deemed these struggles experienced by indigent patients as not randomly occurring. Rather, they are brought about by exercising biopower or the power over life that the government possesses through their development of PhilHealth’s benefit packages for COVID-19 that can directly act on individual bodies and regulate the population all for the sake of battling the COVID-19 virus and ultimately fostering life.