The Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) will pay the Philippine Red Cross (PRC) P265 million in dues this week after its COVID-19 swab testing debt ballooned to nearly a billion pesos, a spokesman said Wednesday.
“We announced that for this week, we are preparing a payment of P112 million, and we are rushing another batch of payment before the week ends. In total, that’s going to be P265 million only for this week,” PhilHealth Spokesman Rey Balena told ANC’s Headstart.
Balena said there were no issues on the capacity of PhilHealth to pay. However, he said it must look into each claim submitted by PRC “because we owe it to the members to be prudent in our payments to our claims, to our providers.”
“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 said.
Some P103.4 million worth of claims have been returned to PRC for compliance, he said.
Baleña said PhilHealth would lose some P13 billion this year after the increase in members’ contribution was deferred.
The adjustment of members’ monthly premium to 3.5 percent from the current 3 percent was supposed to generate that much had it pushed through, said Baleña.
Despite the deficit in projected income, the agency’s projects will push through since it still has about P137 billion in reserve funds, said Baleña.
In October last year, PRC halted its testing of overseas Filipino workers, those arriving in seaports and airports, and from the mega swabbing facilities through local governments after PhilHealth failed to pay close to P1 billion.
In his tweet on Monday, Sen. Richard Gordon said the PRC hoped PhilHealth would settle its dues “before this becomes a ‘Part 2’ of the issue.”
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri, along with Sens. Grace Poe, Joel Villanueva, Nancy Binay, Win Gatchalian, and Juan Edgardo Angara, have filed Senate Bill 1968, amending the Universal Health Care Act (UHC Act) to suspend the scheduled increase in Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) premium contributions.
In the UHC Act, under which all Filipino citizens are part of the National Health Insurance Program, PhilHealth premium contributions are scheduled to increase annually in increments of 0.5 percent of an individual’s monthly basic salary beginning 2021 until 2025.
But owing to the current pandemic and its attendant economic impact on the Filipino people, this bill seeks to amend the UHC Act to postpone the scheduled increase to the year after any given public health emergency.
“The PhilHealth premium increase is just not timely,” Zubiri said.
“And we have to understand why people would rather hold on to their hard-earned money than hand it over to PhilHealth, given PhilHealth’s history,” he further said, referring to the corruption schemes within PhilHealth that went public last year.
In an earlier statement, Sen. Christopher Go has confirmed that President Rodrigo Duterte favored passing a law that would postpone the increase in PhilHealth premium contributions, given the pandemic.
“I believe in the UHC Act’s goals,” Zubiri stressed. “But we have to consider our current situation, and now is not the time for this PhilHealth increase.”
According to Go, Budget Secretary Wendel Avisado and PhilHealth CEO Dante Gierran were also working on how the government could unburden Filipinos by shouldering the cost while ensuring that the UHC law was implemented and the services of PhilHealth were unhampered.
“Whether we amend the law or augment the funds of PhilHealth, let us work together to find a viable solution to achieve universal health care for all without imposing unnecessary burden to ordinary Filipinos during this challenging time,” he said.
Go earlier appealed to government finance managers and his fellow legislators to highly consider the deferment of the increase in PhilHealth contributions to unburdened Filipinos given the adverse socio-economic impacts of the health crisis.
On the part of the Legislature, Senate President Vicente Sotto III and House Speaker Lord Allan Velasco also said that both Houses of Congress would act immediately on calls to defer the increase on the monthly contribution rates.
President Duterte, in his Talk to the People on Monday night, January 4, told PhilHealth chief Dante Gierran to suspend the monthly premium hike amid the ongoing health crisis.