In Canada, a grateful community even elected their Filipino doctor to the parliament where he distinguished himself as a leader of his political party.

Sadly, there have been occasions in the past when one or two – at most a handful – of Filipino medical practitioners have behaved in a manner that tarnished the reputation of the rest of their compatriots. In the mid-70s, among the first physicians to be charged with large scale federal medical insurance fraud was a Filipino. Nevertheless, these instances have been few and far between.

Recently however, the Philippines as a whole is struggling with its image as a society able to take care of its own and at the same time share medical talent with other countries. The Cebu incident two weeks ago indicated a major flaw in our system of inculcating the kind of human values that would prevent health professionals from behaving in a inhumane manner towards another Filipino whose preferences had gotten him into trouble.

And now comes the 100 million dollar US veterans’ health insurance reimbursement scam. It appears that for over a decade, a hospital or group of hospitals in the Philippines and their medical staff have been conniving with resident American veterans and groups in the United States to claim millions of dollars as payment for health care services that were either never rendered or grossly overstated.

In a report published in a Philippine daily, the leader of the infamous Private Hospitals Association of the Philippines (PHAP for short but not to be confused with the Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Association of the Philippines) blamed the American funding agency for the occurrence saying, "For me, it’s their fault. They should have accredited reputable health service providers and strictly monitored the program." This may have some truth but in fact it sounds much like blaming a car-owner for having his vehicle carnapped.

The fact is that Philippine institutions regulated by Philippine agencies and staffed by Philippine health professionals were involved in lying, cheating and stealing. Unfortunately, the entire country, not just the doctors or other health professionals, should share in the shame if not the blame for these incidents. Even more unfortunately, we must also bear the brunt of the fallout in the form of loss of face and damaged reputation of Filipino health professionals.

The situation really calls for an in-depth review of our system for educating health professionals and accrediting academic and service health institutions. It is not enough to simply help in identifying responsible individuals in the veterans’ fraud case. It is not enough to remove licenses and mete individual professional sanctions.

We must revisit the very basis for our medical and nursing school systems. When the government relinquished regulatory control over these, "market forces" were allowed to determine the appropriate quantity and quality of their products. Unfortunately, the driving principle behind so-called "market forces" is profit or greed. Unless the systems for teaching our health professionals are thoroughly revamped, the best that our regulatory agencies from the Department of Health to the Professional Regulatory Commission can hope for is to "regulate their greed."

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Conservative Catholic theoreticians have not changed their ways much since the Middle Ages when they were wont to engage in endless debates on the question of how many angels could stand on the tip of a needle. These discussions were so important to such great thinkers that neither famine nor plague nor any other disaster could dissuade them to pause and consider the plight of suffering human beings for a while.

At the last board meeting of the Population Commission of the Philippines (POPCOM), a member appointed by Malacañang who also happens to be with the Opus Dei (of The Da Vinci Code fame) entertained his fellow commissioners with a fanciful calculation of the Philippines’ true population growth rate (PGR).

"The National Statistics Office is wrong," he declared. "The true Philippine PGR is not 2.04 but 1.74 percent!" It is for this reason (namely that our PGR is not so high after all) that these religious zealots believe that the country should be more concerned with the high fatality rates from vehicular accidents than the fact that our maternal mortality rate is at the same level as that of least developed countries.

Meanwhile, poor Filipino families with six or seven children continue to struggle to survive with the price of food steadily rising, the environment continuously deteriorating, and preventable and curable diseases unremittingly taking their toll on chronically malnourished bodies.