Special Kind of Idiots

Special Kind of Idiots

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Oct. 11 was the press launch of the Leon Kilat Marathon Festival before members of the Dumaguete media. The launch was hosted by the Silliman University Medical Center Foundation Inc. at its Board Room on the 5th floor of the Medical Arts Bldg.

It’s about time we remembered our very own homegrown hero during the Filipino uprising against our Spanish rulers.

All these years, Gen. Pantaleon Villegas, more popularly known as “Leon Kilat”, has largely been forgotten and unappreciated especially in his own hometown of Bacong. Leon Kilat was a high-ranking commander of Andres Bonifacio’s Katipuneros. While Bonifacio’s commanders concentrated mostly in Luzon, General Villegas was the recognized leader of the revolutionaries in the Visayas.

In his honor, Leon Kilat has a military camp named after him in Tanjay, and a monument stands in memory of his martyrdom in Carcar, Cebu. Yet, his hometown of Bacong doesn’t have a Leon Kilat Day or a festival to celebrate his exemplary bravery, heroism, and patriotism.

Here’s a thought. For someone so significant in our local history, the authorities should consider relocating Camp Leon Kilat to Bacong, to secure the new international airport soon to be built there.

Or better yet, the new facility should be named the Leon Kilat International Airport. Yes, even a belated recognition of this Filipino hero would be most welcome.

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Meanwhile, the running enthusiasts and stakeholders from the Negros Oriental Sports Confederation, the Dumaguete Adventure Runners & Striders (DARS), and the Metro Dumaguete Roadrunners Club (MDRC), in cooperation with the group Kaliwat ni Leon Kilat, have initiated an idea to honor Leon Kilat, an idea ripe for our time.

On Dec. 7 to 8, the Leon Kilat Marathon Festival will be held covering the towns of Bacong, Dauin, Zamboanguita, Valencia, and the City of Dumaguete. The highlight is a 50-kilometer ultramarathon for endurance runners from around the country. Held simultaneously with this race will be a 21-kilometer half marathon, and a 10.5k quarter marathon for other runners and health enthusiasts.

The beneficiary of this Leon Kilat Marathon Festival is the Oriental Negros Emergency Rescue Foundation Inc.

ONE Rescue EMS is a private organization of volunteers which has provided free emergency medical services within the Metro Dumaguete area over the last 10 years. Since the start of its operations, ONE Rescue EMS has served the public by responding to an average of 10 to 12 emergency calls daily, 90 percent of which involve vehicular accidents.

When the Negros Oriental Sports Development Program, DARS, and MDRC formally organized fun runs, marathons, and ultramarathons in 2011, ONE Rescue EMS had always been the designated medical emergency responder for the races.

At the press launch, Race Director Paultom Paras cracked this joke about these distance runners in the various ultramarathons they organize here in Negros Oriental or join in other places: These runners must be a Special Kind of Idiots — competing in a race without any prizes at stake, just simply the joy of long distance running, and the “bragging rights” of having completed each long long run. On top of that, these Special Kind of Idiots pay a registration fee to join the race that promises no prize!

How could anything be more absurd than this?

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Well, it turns out that there’s an even higher level of idiocy in the medical charity industry. Recently, Philhealth uncovered a terrible scam amounting to losses in the hundreds of billions of pesos.

In one case, a private hemodialysis provider in Quezon City had defrauded Philhealth of millions of pesos by unscrupulously claiming payments for treatments to non-existent kidney patients, or, worse, those who had long been dead.

In a knee-jerk response to the massive fraud against it, the government “tightened up” on the procedure for patients seeking medical help from its agencies.

For instance, to ensure that the applicant patient is really still alive, the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office has added the requirement that the patient should have his picture taken with the day’s newspaper that clearly shows the date on its front page.

On its face, this requirement seemed fair and reasonable. However, a more thoughtful analysis exposes the sheer stupidity of this additional imposition on patients in need of medical charity. Not only does it fail to guarantee that the picture being submitted hasn’t been Photoshopped, which could become a new scheme for fraud by enterprising scammers, it also imposes a costly burden upon the patients who are already beset with the highly-prohibitive medical costs.

We must realize that the greater population of those seeking medical charity are indigent or needy. To require a patient to have his photo taken with the day’s newspaper assumes that the patient has access to at least a cellphone with camera, he has money to buy a newspaper, and that he has extra resources to the have the photo printed. True, the costs may be minimal, but they do add up.

A dialysis patient averages three sessions a week at approximately P3,000 per session. Then there are the hormone injections for platelet maintenance of about P1,500 per week. This means an average cost of P10,500 per week or P42,000 a month.

The P42,00 does not include the maintenance medication and laboratories that every kidney patient must have. Additional costs, no matter how small, impose a difficult burden on a patient!

What’s tragic about this idiocy is that a no-expense alternative is actually already available. Barangay offices regularly issue certifications of residence, of having no criminal record, or of status of indigency, among others, as a public service for free.

Surely, a barangay chairperson can issue a certificate of a patient being still alive. Since the barangay is a government entity, its certifications enjoy the presumption of regularity, and are more reliable than potentially-Photoshopped pictures. And that’s not idiotic at all!

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Author’s email: [email protected]

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