By Louis ‘Barok‘ C. Biraogo — October 24, 2024
ST. LUKE’S Medical Center dazzles with its promise of luxury healthcare—if you can pay the price. Its slick ads boast of cutting-edge technology and an unmatched level of care, leaving little doubt about its prestige. But scratch the surface, and a darker reality emerges: one of rampant mismanagement that puts lives at risk and leaves families reeling.
Let’s start with the tuberculosis (TB) screenings—a process that should be a routine matter for those seeking U.S. visas. Yet, St. Luke’s Medical Center Extension Clinic has turned it into an ordeal, routinely diagnosing Filipinos with suspected TB at alarming rates. While the U.S. requires all visa applicants to undergo medical tests, St. Luke’s appears to be seeing far too many “false positives.” After additional and costly sputum tests, a staggering 98% of those suspected of TB are found to be clear. How is this possible? Is the Philippines, as the clinic’s diagnoses suggest, suddenly a TB hotspot? Or, as some suspect, is there something deeply wrong with St. Luke’s testing process?
Consider the personal toll of these misdiagnoses. One Filipino, who had lived in the U.S. for 15 years, passed his U.S. medical exams with flying colors. But upon returning to the Philippines to complete his visa process, St. Luke’s flagged him for TB. Weeks of stressful and expensive testing later, he was found negative. His life—and visa process—was needlessly derailed. The absurdity doesn’t end there. A mother, the principal applicant for a visa, was forced into weeks of tests at St. Luke’s, causing delays that left her child ineligible due to age. Another woman, rushing to the U.S. to see her dying mother, missed the last moments with her because of prolonged TB tests that, of course, turned up negative.
These are not isolated incidents. St. Luke’s seems determined to uncover TB where none exists. Is it incompetence? Negligence? Or something more insidious—an unspoken profit motive driving patients through a gauntlet of needless tests? Either way, the impact on people’s lives is undeniable. Families are torn apart, deadlines missed, and hard-earned money wasted, all while the medical center rakes in fees for procedures that, by any reasonable measure, should not have been necessary.
And it doesn’t stop there. Within the hallowed halls of St. Luke’s Bonifacio Global City (BGC) branch, the chaos deepens. Patients who’ve endured weeks of care are kept hostage by a broken billing system. Upon discharge, many are made to wait for hours—not because of some unforeseen complication, but because doctors have failed to submit their fees on time. Why are these fees not registered ahead of time? No one seems to have an answer. Instead, patients, who should be home recovering, are left stranded as billing clerks scramble to track down physicians by phone. The delay, of course, costs them more in unnecessary hospital fees.
And then there’s the records department—a Kafkaesque nightmare for anyone daring to retrieve their medical files. Multiple trips, endless waits, and excuses about missing signatures are par for the course. Patients call ahead only to be told that their records are ready, only to arrive and be sent away empty-handed. It can take up to four visits—four days of lost time, expenses, and frustration—just to get a simple medical record.
How can a medical institution that charges such exorbitant fees operate with such dysfunction? Why has St. Luke’s, a hospital held up as one of the country’s finest, become a black hole of inefficiency and unnecessary expense?
The Department of Health must act—not tomorrow, not next week, but now. Behind the polished walls of St. Luke’s lies a healthcare system that has failed the very people it was built to serve. This is not just about mismanagement; it’s about lives hanging in the balance. The consequences of inaction are clear: more delays, more suffering, more shattered trust. The Filipino people deserve healthcare that values human dignity—not just profits.
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KWEBA ni BAROK 
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