Anchoring UHC for the next generation
The 2025 Universal Health Coverage Day theme, “Unaffordable health costs? We’re sick of it!” strongly resonates a collective cry of the majority of Filipinos who know they are a single sickness away from financial ruin. While a core premise of UHC is ensuring financial protection, its full realization demands an increased commitment to proactively shaping a health system that protects us before we get sick, radically addresses inequity, prevents corruption from leaking vital resources, and strengthens its integrity against the destructive impact of the climate crisis.
To truly make health costs affordable and access universal, the government must ramp up its focus toward health promotion and prevention, upholding a system that keeps people well, especially the most vulnerable. There are three interconnected areas that can anchor this: protecting the future generation, reorienting access to reduce inequity, and improving systemic integrity.
Protecting our future: the stunting and addiction crisis. Our children are a nonnegotiable priority. It is the duty of the government to put systems in place to ensure that children have optimal nutrition, protected from ultraprocessed food and addictive substances.
Health promotion starts in the first 1,000 days of life, investing in nutrition that prevents stunting and wasting and supports cognitive development. A recent report by the Second Congressional Commission on Education and the Philippine Institute for Development Studies highlights the devastating reality: 26.7 percent of Filipino children under five are stunted, leading to irreversible cognitive damage, fueling learning crisis, and impacting on the country’s economy in the long-term.
Furthermore, we are failing to defend our youth from harmful consumption of tobacco and alcoholic beverages
The government must regulate these products and promotions that target children. Health promotion is an act of defense, providing an environment that empowers children and their families with the skills and resources to make health-enabling decisions.
Reorienting access: Investing in generational health. UHC cannot progress when pregnancies are not safe and healthy, as maternal deaths have profound, devastating implications for the future of surviving children. Maternal deaths overwhelmingly strike most vulnerable women. The government needs to double down in reorienting health system services to provide accessible reproductive health support and dignified care.
Investing in reproductive and maternal health is a generational investment. The fact that the Philippines has one of the highest adolescent birth rates in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and still has a high maternal mortality rate is a stark reminder of our systemic failures to protect young women and provide comprehensive reproductive health services.
Improving systemic integrity: Confronting the “silent” destroyers. The government’s commitment to UHC must include a bold and accountable fight against the two forces currently dismantling our hard-won gains: corruption and the climate crisis.
Corruption in the health sector means essential preventive care, medicines, and screening equipment are unavailable, and health promotion campaigns lack resources. This is often worse in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas. Every peso lost to corruption translates to a child denied care and to lives lost. UHC financing must be safeguarded through improved transparency in procurement and contracting, and through the strict disclosure of conflicts of interests.
Another silent catastrophic public health emergency is climate change. Rising temperatures, erratic weather, and extreme events drive food insecurity, population displacement, expand the range of vector-borne diseases, damage health infrastructures, and collectively impact mental health.
We need investments in climate-adaptable and resilient infrastructure—health facilities that are not flooded—along with effective early warning systems for heatwaves and outbreaks. Furthermore, surveillance of emerging and reemerging diseases, and targeted health promotion interventions must protect vulnerable populations from heat stress, malnutrition, or harmful consumption linked to an impacted food system. UHC is not a destination; it is a dynamic process of continuous justice. The government must prove its political will by investing in the health promotion that raises a healthy generation, eradicating the inequities that shame us, and defending our collective health against the corruption and climate threats that seek to pull us all under.
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Dr. Katherine Ann Reyes serves as the program lead of the health promotion program at the Institute of Clinical Epidemiology, National Institutes of Health, University of the Philippines Manila. The views expressed here are the author’s personal insights.
