FALSE: PH Doctors support Marcos

Claim: It was Marcos (Sr.) who pushed for the Philippine Heart Center, Lung Center of the Philippines, National Kidney Transplant Institute, and Philippine Children’s Medical Center, and these projects paved the way for Filipino doctors to come home and practice their profession.

Category: False

Complete Details: In a Facebook post by We are One Pilipinas, it has claimed that many doctors are for Ferdinand Marcos Jr because the infrastructure projects by his father paved the way for Filipino doctors to come home to the Philippines to practice their profession and live happily and peacefully.

Why we fact-check this: While it cannot be denied that the abovementioned medical facilities were built during the regime of President Marcos, Sr. it was rife with problems caused by graft and corruption in the government. in the Journal of medical ethics, 1991 (https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/17/supplement/42.full.pdf) states that Over 50 percent of the country’s doctors and more than 60 percent of its nurses work outside of the country. This is contrary to what the post implies.

Furthermore, in an article in the Los Angeles Times titled ‘Neglected for Years: Health Care: Philippine Crisis Looms’ published on March 6, 1987 (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-03-06-mn-4964-story.html) reads in part: “a nightmare of needless death and chronic disease caused largely by two decades of manipulation, corruption, and neglect under deposed President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

According to statistics gathered from the World Health Organization, the United Nations, Philippine government physicians and health officials, and several international relief agencies working in the Philippines, tens of thousands of Filipinos die each year simply because there are too few hospitals, too few doctors, too little medical equipment and medicine and too little money to help the government cure its national disaster.”