An Act Establishing General Hospital with Twenty-Five Bed Capacity in Municipality of Sultan Mastura and Appropriating Funds Therefor

This establishes a general hospital with 25 beds in Sultan Mastura, Maguindanao del Norte.

The note uses the same frame as its companions: the 6 municipalities of the northern first district of Maguindanao, 345,227 people between them, served by the Cotabato Sanitarium at Pinaring and the Iranun District Hospital at Parang.

Sultan Mastura is the smallest of the 6, with 25,331 people at the 2020 census. Applying the Department of Health ratio of 1 bed per 1,000, the district's 275 beds fall short of its 345,227 population, and the bill proposes 25 beds in the municipality that has none.

On the bill's own ratio, 25 beds for 25,331 people is exactly right — the Department of Health standard of 1 bed per 1,000 produces 25 beds for this municipality almost to the person. Of the 4 bills in this set it is the one whose ask matches its arithmetic, which is worth noting because the Buldon bill documents a 70-bed district shortfall and asks for 25, and the Cotabato City bill documents a far larger one.

That precision cuts against the bill as well as for it. A hospital sized exactly to a municipality's own population has no capacity for the neighbouring catchment, and the companion Buldon bill expressly contemplates its hospital serving beyond its own municipality. Two 25-bed hospitals 1 municipality apart, each sized for its own residents, is a different plan from 1 50-bed hospital serving both, and nothing in either bill addresses which is better.

There is a cross-reference worth carrying. Bill No. 284, filed in February 2024 by another member, proposes renaming Sultan Mastura to the Municipality of Subpangen, subject to a plebiscite. If both measures ever moved, the hospital this bill establishes would open in a municipality with a different name from the one in its own enacting text — the kind of collision that follows from measures on the same place travelling separately.

MP Ambolodto filed 4 hospital bills over 2 days in July 2023 — Buldon, Sultan Mastura, Kabuntalan and Cotabato City — and all 4 argue from the same method rather than from hardship. Each names the catchment, counts its population from the 2020 census, lists the hospitals serving it with their bed capacities, applies the Department of Health ratio of 1 bed per 1,000 people, and states the resulting shortfall. No other hospital bills in this registry do the arithmetic. All 4 remain at Second Reading, Committee Stage.

A drafting note common to the set: the constitutional citations are unreliable. Three of the 4 bills cite the right to health as "Section 15, Article III" when it is Article II, and 1 cites the integrated-approach provision as "Section 11, Article XII" when it is Article XIII. Each bill has at least 1 wrong reference and they are not wrong in the same way, which is what happens when a shared preamble is retyped rather than copied.