Deputy Speaker Rufus Rodriguez. Screengrabbed from PeaceGovPh YouTube channel.
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CAGAYAN de Oro 2nd District Rep. Rufus Rodriguez today urged President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Congress, and the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) to restore the P3.3 billion that was cut from the proposed 2023 budgets of the University of the Philippines (UP) System and the Philippine General Hospital (PGH).

Based on the proposed P5.268-trillion 2023 national budget, Rodriguez said UP would suffer a funding reduction of P2.5 billion, while PGH would lose P893 million.

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“We should be increasing the budgetary allocations of state universities and colleges (SUCs), which are the poor student’s schools of choice, and government hospitals, which are the pauper’s go-to health facilities, instead of reducing their funds,” he said.

He said the administration of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. would be sending the wrong message if it insists on cutting funding for UP and PGH.

He added that UP and other SUCs are where indigent students from all over the country prefer to enroll because taxpayers subsidize education in these schools.

Meanwhile, Rodriguez pointed out that PGH and other government hospitals are where indigents patients go for their health care needs.

“Unlike private health facilities, these hospitals are allocated medical assistance funds in the national budget, which they use to help poor patients,” he said.

He said depriving PGH of P893 million would mean cutting medical assistance funds and hospital requirements for treating people infected with Covid-19.

“PGH is at the forefront of the fight against the pandemic. At the height of the health crisis, it was full of Covid-19 patients,” Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez suggested that the DBM restore the UP and PGH reductions by sending a budget erratum or errata to the House of Representatives.

“They did that in the past. It is they who could easily make the necessary adjustments,” he said.

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Ben Balce is this newspaper's Associate Editor. Before joining the Gold Star Daily, Ben worked as the regional correspondent for northern Mindanao of Malaya, (now Business Insight) and Abante, both Manila-based national newspapers. Ben joined Gold star daily in 1997 as a city reporter. After 3-months, he was appointed by Gold Star Daily's publisher Ernesto G. Chu, to be the paper’s editorial cartoonist. Ben was a newspaperman and an editorial cartoonist of Gold Star Daily for more than ten years. He was also commissioned as the Executive Editor of the Quarterly Newsletter of the Police Regional Office 10 (PRO-10) from 2002 to 2007. Ben was a regular member of local and international news organizations, which includes among others Cagayan de Oro Press Club (COPC), National Union of Journalist in the Philippines (NUJP), Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ), and Peace and Conflict Journalism Network (Pecojon).