Obviously, some new arrivals just went through a long trip. Tired faces, bleary eyes. Their attires were not meant for a fashion show. Slippers are weather beaten. Everything about them show they left home in a hurry. Appearances be damned. To get to the hospital the soonest was the goal. The earlier, the better the chance of saving a life.
Suddenly, they were uprooted from their comfort zone, what they call home. Feeding the dogs, or the goats or carabao must have been hurriedly requested of a neighbor. They ended up in a city hospital where they are not at ease, with their big bags stuffed with what they could immediately get their hands on, just in case they would be confined for days.
After the initial emergency attention, they are told to go for some laboratory analysis. Usually regarding the urine or the blood or what is in there like sugar. Often they are worried or a bit dazed on how much would it cost. It is the same with us city residents, but any deficiency in our pockets just might be a phone call away. Not to those from the provinces who might be 100s of kilometers away.
Sure, provincianos might have a lot of valuable assets or money back home, but when they had to leave racing against life and death, what they might have been able to get hold of was survival amount only for a day or two.
Which brings us to the crux of the matter here. If you live in Marcos Highway, the main gateway to the city, a peculiar sound anytime of the day are the siren sounds of ambulances bringing up from the lowlands medical emergencies. They almost always end up at the Baguio General Hospital. Why? There are supposed to be good hospitals down there built and equipped with hundreds of millions of budgets. Most of such amounts are corrupted by politicians resulting in poor equipment or very low capability to achieve their medical mandate. Emergency patients would often die. So families would rather take the chance of bringing their sick to far away facilities like hospitals in Baguio City.
We could only hope for the day when outlying communities would have government hospitals near them that could competently deal with serious medical cases.
The culprits are not just our corrupt politicians. A big factor also is our stupidity as voters. Take for instance the case of former Senator Dick Gordon. He fought long and hard for the honest to goodness investigation in the Senate of the corruption of Philhealt funds amounting to billions of pesos. Former President Duterte was even implicated in that. After the painstaking process, the Senate recommended the filing of corruption charges against several cronies of the former president who should also be charged after he left office.
How did the people react to this? They did not even vote for Gordon to go back to the Senate. Stupid is, stupid was.**