On July 15th, my daughter Rhiannon Siobhan Alarcon Macleod was born in Manila, Philippines.
In March, mom was fired from her job for being pregnant. Lost her medical coverage, and had't been able to find new work.
Got to love this medical system here in the Philippines. And the "skill" of the doctors. Or lack thereof.
I chose this hospital because no other hospital or OBGYN here seemed competent. A friend here recently had a baby at a "public" hospital and they nearly killed her. Over the last nine months, I've come back and forth from the US to the Phils several times and been to various medical appointments with mom. The medical care is beyond sub-par here, to say the least.
St Lukes hospital had a maternity/delivery package. 65,000 phillipine pesos. About $1100 USD. We had already discussed it withthe OBGYN. Good to go... or so we thought.
C-section day comes, they want to deliver two weeks early. Admissions denies us the maternity package because.... mom has type 2 diabetes. That had already been discussed withthe OBGYN who said it should be no problem with regards to the maternity package. (the vast majority of Filipinos have diabetes, I suspect, due to the insane amount of rice and fast food and questionable street food they eat, because fast food is cheaper than home cooked food.) "Rice is life" or so they say. Until it kills you. Nevermind that everything here is sickeningly sweet.
Instead of the planned 65,000 pesos, the hospital bill for mom turns out to be over half a million. A hair under $9000. Must pay before discharge.
Or else.
Within hours they had whisked the baby off because of a bit of jaundice and minor breathing issue.
The next day, she's worse. She's stopped breathing a few times and the doctors observed her turn blue twice. It turns out that an improperly inserted feeding tube had given her aspiration pneumonia. Apparently blowing feeding fluid into her lungs. They discovered that during an X-ray, when a doctor started going nuts about how far the tube had been inserted.
So she's been in the ICU ever since, on antibiotics and under the blue light.
thankfully, she's getting better, albeit slowly. We don't know how much longer she'll be there. Slowly but surely, they are lowering the oxygen feed.
So now the ICU bill is ramping up quickly. They want 50% of the new half million pesos right away.
Or else.
Ok, so this is a lot more expensive than it was suposed to be. And I'm running out of options since business has been at a near standstill for months now.
Not only are the doctors imcompetent, but so are the notary publics. Had to take five copies of the birth certificate to get notarized. Notary screwed up every one of them by
not following the instructions that were stapled to them.
There's a lot of talk about the Philippines being cheaper than the US. That may be true for some things, such as housing (which is pretty sub-par as well) , or car repairs (Toyota dealer labor rate here is $12/hr) but when you want to buy something, you're going to pay through the nose. Or, apparently, when you need to have a baby at a reasonably modern facility with reasonably modern equipment.
