MANILA, Philippines — Health Secretary Francisco Duque III has “failed miserably” in his mandate as corruption allegations continue to hound the government’s health system, Sen. Grace Poe said Tuesday.
“The numbers will show that you have failed miserably as the lead of both PhilHealth and the DOH [Department of Health],” Poe told Duque during the third hearing of the Senate into the alleged corruption within the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth).
As DOH secretary, Duque currently sits as PhilHealth ex-officio chairman.
Poe said the health secretary could not feign ignorance about the “systemic” corruption happening inside PhilHealth, having held top posts in the agency for 11 years.
Duque told the Senate that he served as PhilHealth president from 2001 to 2005, then as chairman from 2005 to 2010 before returning as its head in 2017.
Likening PhilHealth to a cancer patient, Poe said the state insurer had been constantly plagued by allegations of corruption and inefficiency through the years.
“This keeps on happening repeatedly even before. All I can say is that, if there’s one person who has institutional knowledge of PhilHealth, if we base it on length of service as head, it’s you,” Poe told Duque in Filipino.
“Considering how long that period was, all I can say is that you keep mentioning that you have a crusade against corruption. But this seems to go against what you have shown,” Poe said.
Poe noted that in 2018, a total of 4,357 administrative cases involving PhilHealth]were submitted, but not one was acted upon by the management.
“If only Secretary Duque had strong leadership — and he’s supposed to idolize President Duterte, who is known for his quick decisions — then he could have tackled these. Unfortunately, he didn’t,” she said.
Further, she highlighted the findings from the agency’s tracking system Machine Learning Identification, Detection, and Analysis System (MIDAS) about the possible presence of “ghost” dialysis patients.
“A lot of the documents were sent to the Senate at the last minute. I think some of them were received just yesterday and this is almost like dumping on us all of these voluminous papers and at the last minute we had to review each and every one of them,” Poe said.
“I think it’s almost like intentional that this is being done,” she added.
The senator also flagged the disparity in the reimbursement claims of hospitals and health centers for dialysis procedures, which she said ranged from P737,000 to P33 million.
“You’ve been there for 11 years. And the same things keep happening again and again. What’s the solution now that’s different that you were not able to do before?” Poe said.
“You know many are asking for you to quit. But you’re continuing, you’re still there in that agency,” she added.
Fourteen senators, including Poe, earlier urged Duque to step down as health secretary over what they said was his poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But Duque continues to enjoy the trust of President Rodrigo Duterte, who refuses to remove him as health chief.
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