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.
