One of the biggest concerns for retiring expats to the Philippines is quality medical care (and insurance). Generally speaking, if you want a health care facility that is somewhat close to the type of facility you are accustomed to in your home country, the two main cities to keep in mind are Manila and Cebu.
Between the two, I prefer Cebu. Manila has the Makati areas which are nice but also about as expensive as living in a western economy. For some that is not an issue. Surrounding Makati is a lot of urban blight, traffic, smog and crime. It all depends on where you spend your time. For me, I'd rather hang my hat in Cebu, IT Park area. Yes, there are the same issues as Manila, but not as bad and not so much of it. Plus you can easily travel to other locations via the airport and/or ocean piers nearby.
But getting back to medical facilities, anything outside of Manila or Cebu is going to be substandard at best and similar to a MASH unit in some places. Especially the provincial hospitals, those can be downright archaic. They do what they can with the extremely limited funds they have, so if you want high quality health care, stick with Manila or Cebu.
There is now this new MAAYO medical facility which a fellow Philippines vlogger took the time to check out. You can view his video here. Hope you find it useful. :)
Unfortunately you are correct about provincial health care. Since coming here almost 5 years ago, I personally know of two expats that went into the hospital with relatively minor issues, and came out in a pine box. Both passing from complications due to sepsis. By the time a local hospital transfers patients to another more capable hospital, it is almost too late, as was the experience with my two fellow acquaintance s above. That facility in the video looks very nice and capable. Hope you never have to go there Reekay!
i've been, repeatedly, visiting to a provincial hospital and saw at least half a dozen dogs sleeping under various medical cots or hallways.. inside the hospital. also seen plenty of patients on cots on hallways outside.
i passed by one man in a hallway on a cot. an hour later when i left, he was dead. if an expat knows he's not in good health and NEEDS continual health care, he really needs to live near cebu or manila.
Or Bangkok!
or vietnam, lots of expats going there even from europe.
Definitely, the place for me if I need a hospital. Were they open when he did this video? I didn't see any patients. I'm glad there were none though, it made for an excellent video. I'm going to check out that Primary Plus.