# 5 Barlao, Rachel Anne S.

2C-MT

HECO

I was puzzled with the first seen of the movie John Q . I thought it would be so boring but the movie isn t bad at all. It depicts a warm, closely affiliated family and possessed an intriguing and unusual moral dilemma. It s a two-hour long propaganda piece that extols the virtues of national, governmentrun health care services. John Quincy Archibald, a typical blue-collar family man and struggling to pay his bills and in addition to his dilemma, his son being diagnosed having an enlarged heart that needed a transplant to prolong his life. The hospital director, Rebecca Payne tells John that his insurance cannot cover his son s surgery because Mr. Archibald s employer just downgraded him from a PPO to a secondrate HMO and he can't put up the required $75,000 deposit. Being enrolled in the HMO insurance, if you do not have a referral to a doctor outside of your HMO's network, you will most likely have to pay all or most of the cost for that care. So the hospital refused to put the name of his son on the donor list. The frustration of not being able to finance his son s health care becomes so much for John Q , that he takes over the emergency room of the hospital and hostages the people inside there.

One reason of the disparities in health economics here in the Philippines is the lack of insurance coverage. Without the health insurance, patients are most likely to postpone medicinal care and ending up, buying medicines without prescription that causes their illness to a more severe one and most cases, Doctors need to charge higher prices for non insured customers in order to make up for the lower fees mandated for health insured patients. Lack of financial resources is the biggest problem among us Filipinos. Though, we have government hospitals, the services that they can avail for patients are very limited. Most health care providers go to abroad because of brain drain and higher salary they can receive there.

It can also be seen in the movie that individuals of lower socioeconomic status in the United States, have lower levels of overall health, insurance coverage, and less access to adequate healthcare and in contrast, individuals of higher standing performs jobs that are more likely to have more beneficial health insurance same problem just like us, in the Philippines. Part time workers cant access to a health insurance easily and because of that, they are the most affected people when having a health care problem. In fact, you cannot receive a quality service care here in the Philippines if you don t have enough money to pay all the bills and other fees. Nowadays, the world revolves in money. If you don t have money you don t have any power.