In contrast, as a recent Department of Health advertisement recently claimed, the Philippines has the best health status indicators for children's health among 51 developing countries. Our literacy rate remains among the highest in the third world. The situation of women is better than in most countries of Asia. Indeed, viewed with the right tint of rose-colored glasses and the appropriate bending of perspective, a case can be made that in many respects the Philippines is closer to Paradise than even the developed world.

And yet, Filipinos, by the millions continue to leave their country for what they perceive as greener pastures. Many seek jobs in extremely difficult and dangerous situations such as the Middle East and Africa. For a significant majority of college-educated young people, high paying employment opportunities are available only outside the Philippines. Many Filipinos living and working in developed countries receive high quality health care not available to most people in the Philippines.

To be sure, it is true that there are Filipinos - the fortunate few who can afford to pay out of pocket costs for health care- whose health status compares with the best in the world. Their women bear only the number of children they desire to have. Even under conditions of risk, they can avail of the best in obstetric services. Their children receive specialist pediatric care and are given the newest vaccines available. For these reasons, infant and maternal mortality among the Philippines' highest quintile economic group compare favorably with the most advanced countries in the world.

For many of the poorest of Filipinos however, ignorance, hunger, disease, and insecurity are as real in the Philippines as in Darfur, the Sudan, Myanmar, and the other global hotspots of violence. The most dramatic evidence of this is the fact that reproductive health status indicators among Filipinos in the lowest 20 percent of income groups are comparable to those in those miserable countries.

Filipino children in this socio-economic group are disadvantaged even before birth. Their mothers, with little or no access to good reproductive health information and services, get pregnant too early or have multiple babies up to near the end of their reproductive years - putting their own as well as their children's lives at risk. With little or no pre-natal care, these children are born under less than ideal conditions. Their poorly nourished mothers, misinformed by a bombardment of marketing assaults by producers of baby formulas, stop breast feeding after a month or two. If they are lucky, some of these children will receive immunization shots for at least the six antigens in the government's program.

Growing up poorly nourished and exposed to unsanitary living conditions, the poorest of children are prone to infections. Figures from some non-governmental organizations show that last year 26,000 or 10 percent of children in the lowest income groups died in childhood. Even when they are fortunate enough to get into the crowded public schools, these children will do badly and most eventually drop out early in grade school.

Those who survive to adulthood have little chance of getting out of the cycle of poverty, hunger and disease. Even as they live through bouts of pneumonia, dengue, tuberculosis, malaria, and other infections, poor adults are more likely than their wealthy counterparts to suffer the consequences of the new epidemics of degenerative diseases, diabetes, and cancer.

Those who develop one of these so-called "life-style related" health problems have little chance of cure or mitigation of the sequelae of such diseases. Those with high blood pressure cannot afford the high-priced fancy anti-hypertensives that doctors are prone to prescribe. Diabetes medicines are beyond what they can afford.

Tertiary care for those whose diseases have progressed is out of the question for those in the lowest income quintiles. For end-stage renal disease for example, the few government facilities that offer dialysis are unable to do it for free or at low cost. As for renal transplantation, the few able-bodied individuals among the poor will only be a source of donated kidneys for wealthy Filipinos or rich foreigners.

The latest surveys show that less than half of Filipinos die under the care of a health professional. Even as the country graduates more and more nurses, even as thousands of doctors are licensed each year, hospitals continue to be undermanned and other health facilities remain understaffed.

For the poor, the Philippine health care system is practically non-existent.