Image from PhilHealth Facebook.
MANILA, Philippines — Before resorting to emergency powers to address issues hounding the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth), a strong political will is needed starting with the sacking of Health Secretary Francisco Duque III, Senator Panfilo Lacson said.
“Emergency powers to reorganize PhilHealth? Try real, honest-to-goodness, strong political will first. For a start, fire its ex-officio chairman,” Lacson said in a tweet Friday.
Duque serves as chairman of the PhilHealth board in an ex-officio capacity.
In a separate tweet, Lacson, who initiated the Senate investigation into fresh corruption allegations against the embattled state insurer, stressed that the country will suffer if the Department of Health is “below the level of incompetence” in the wake of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
“No matter how good our country’s economic managers are, if our health department is below the level of incompetence in the middle of this pandemic, we will all sink before we can even start to swim,” Lacson said.
Duque has repeatedly earned the ire of senators over his handling of the pandemic. Fourteen senators earlier signed a resolution calling on him to immediately resign because of this.
Recently, several lawmakers also called him out for not being able to address the alleged rampant corruption in PhilHealth, which he has been at the helm of in different capacities in the course of over two decades.
The Senate committee, which embarked on the PhilHealth investigation, even recommended the filing of criminal charges against the health secretary and several others over the allegedly questionable release of billions of funds under the agency’s emergency cash advance measure.
Duque, who vowed to clear his name, has since dismissed the committee’s findings as “baseless” and were made on “mere allegations alone.”
Aside from the criminal charges, the Senate panel also called on President Rodrigo Duterte to replace Duque and appoint a new health secretary “who has a stronger will to fight corruption.”