Image from PhilHealth Facebook.
MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) will be making a partial payment of P265 million to the Philippine Red Cross (PRC) for the COVID-19 tests administered by the humanitarian organization.
“Earlier we announced that for this week, we are preparing a payment of P112 million and we are rushing another batch of payment. I think before the week ends for another 100 [million]. But in total that is going to be P265 million only for this week,” PhilHealth spokesperson Rey Balena said over ABS-CBN News Channel on Wednesday.
PhilHealth’s standing debt to PRC for COVID-19 tests currently amounts to over P800 million, according to PRC chairman Senator Richard Gordon.
But according to Balena, PhilHealth could not yet pay part of the amount as some of the claims of the Red Cross were found to be “deficient.”
“The issue here basically is the need for PhilHealth to look into each claim of the Red Cross because we owe it to the members to be prudent in our payments. This is basically the main reason why there seems to be a delay in our payments to Red Cross,” he said.
“The good claims, they are being paid promptly, but there are claims that are deficient and those claims need to be returned to Red Cross for compliance,” he added.
According to Balena, a total of P103.4-million worth of claims have been returned to PRC as these claims have insufficient details.
“There were no middle names, they were foreign sounding names, special characters and these will have to be returned for Red Cross for correction,” he said.
“It will all depend on the Philippine Red Cross when they will return these claims and if these are good claims then we will pay them,” he added.
In October last year, the PRC suspended conducting COVID-19 tests chargeable to PhilHealth due to the state insurer’s failure to settle its balance to PRC.
The PRC later resumed its COVID-19 testing after PhilHealth paid a partial amount of its total debt.