Lacson says ‘everything’ is ‘wrong with PhilHealth’

Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson,. Senate PRIB file photo / Voltaire F. Domingo

MANILA, Philippines — “What is wrong with PhilHealth? Everything.”

Presidential aspirant Senator Panfilo Lacson said this on Tuesday in view of the planned “PhilHealth holiday” of private hospitals as a way to show support for hospitals that earlier announced their disengagement from the health insurer due to mounting unpaid claims.

In light of this, Lacson suggested that PhilHealth be headed by “somebody who knows accounting and fund management, not a health practitioner, much less a former law enforcer or a retired general.”

“Therefore, it should be chaired by the Secretary of the Department of Finance (DOF), not of the Department of Health (DOH). PhilHealth deals with health insurance, not health,” he said in a statement.

Former National Bureau of Investigation director Dante Gierran is currently at the helm of PhilHealth. Gierran replaced Ricardo Morales, a retired army general, who resigned in 2020 at the height of congressional investigations over alleged corruption in PhilHealth.

Senate President Vicente Sotto III filed last year Senate Bill No. 1829, which seeks to amend the Universal Health Care Act and allow the appointment of the DOF Secretary as head of the PhilHealth board.

“The Senate inquiry on PhilHealth anomalies as a consequence of my…privilege speech in 2019 resulted in the filing of criminal and administrative charges against top PhilHealth officials after we transmitted to Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra voluminous documents and other pieces of evidence that we gathered during the Senate Committee of the Whole hearings,” Lacson went on.

However, the senator said that the cases remain pending either before the Ombudsman or the Sandiganbayan.

“As long as the wheels of justice grind at an irritatingly slow pace and the conviction and graft and corruption cases remain very low, we cannot expect corruption to abate, no matter how many Senate inquiries we conduct,” he said.

“That said, the Senate can only do so much in the exercise of our legislative and oversight mandate. There is no saying here that we are powerless. I am only trying to say that we always do our part in this regard,” he added.

Hospitals urged to rethink ‘PhilHealth holiday’

The state insurer, for its part, earlier said it hoped PHAPI would reconsider its planned “PhilHealth holiday.”

“Eventually it will be the Filipino people who will suffer the consequences of such a call,” PhilHealth spokesperson Shirley Domingo said in a message to the Inquirer.

According to Domingo, PhilHealth had fast-tracked the release of P11.64 billion for the payment of claims through the Debit Credit Payment Method (DCPM) to hospital partners nationwide as of Dec. 24.

JPV