I once worked in a health facility where the cruelest irony thrived: those who gave care received none for themselves. The national health insurance, meant to be a lifeline, was nothing more than a tattered cloth—barely covering the basics. The stipends offered under the sick-staff policy were crumbs, incapable of bridging the vast gulf between need and reality.
Moving from one unit to another felt less like walking through a hospital and more like wandering into a marketplace. Every corner demanded payment, every service carried a price. If fortune smiled, your own unit might grant a few procedures for free. But fortune is not healthcare. Fortune is not justice. And fortune did not save our colleague.
She was admitted into her own unit, surrounded by the very people she had labored beside. Yet she died—not because medicine failed, but because money stood in the way. The financial demands were merciless, and the system was indifferent. Her death was not just a tragedy; it was a mirror held up to us all.
That place ceased to feel like a hospital. It became a marketplace of desperation, a den of thieves, a hive of hypocrisy. Even those of faith were faithlessly neck-deep in unapproved charges, profiting from the suffering of the sick. Those with a shred of conscience left siphoned patients into their private facilities. Colleagues worked part-time in the hospital but full-time in their own practices.
I had to leave, because staying meant betraying my values. Yet the question still haunts me: do we truly blame them for choosing survival when no one cared for them? Will they escape the ultimate judgment when humanity must give account to its Maker?
How does it feel to pour healing into others while being denied healing yourself? How does it feel to see patients from other government agencies afford the best of healthcare health staff can only dream of? How safe is it to labor in an environment where the healer is unprotected, where the caregiver is expendable?
Even if management seems blind, selfishly caring only for itself and for political interests, why do staff not open their eyes to one another’s pain? Why can’t we also bend the rules to care for each other? Why does the collective conscience bend so easily toward profit before people? How strong can one individual remain when the community itself has surrendered its soul?
The paradox is unbearable: those entrusted with life are themselves abandoned to death. Those trained to heal are themselves wounded by neglect. And yet, society expects them to keep giving, to keep smiling, to keep serving.
Let us be honest: a system that does not care for its carers is already sick. A hospital that heals patients but kills its staff is not a hospital—it is a contradiction. The health of the healer is the foundation of healing.
And this phenomenon is not confined to healthcare. Do we not see teachers who cannot afford education for their children? Restaurant waitresses whose families sleep hungry? Workers who serve but are themselves starved? The list is endless.
We must resist this culture of exploitation that demands caregivers pour from empty cups. We must demand a new ethic: that those who bear the burdens of others must not be left to carry their own alone. For the wound of the carer is the wound of the cared-for. And if the carer collapses, the whole body of society collapses with them. Healthcare is only the tip of the iceberg—a symptom of a larger disease in a society bent on self-destruction.
As for me, I will keep writing, because silence is complicity. And if anyone still asks why I am vehemently against our relentless quest to turn every sector of national life into individual greed instead of collective good—taking basic necessities like health, food, clothing, and shelter out of reach for the very people who work themselves to the bone—my answer will remain:
