By Alithea De Jesus

After the whistleblower resigned anti-fraud officer Thorrsson Montes Keith spilled the beans on the PhilHealth Officials in the alleged P15-Billion Fraud due to corruption, member contributors dreaded the forecast dry up the funds by 2022.

While resigned PhilHealth officials President and CEO retired General Ricardo Morales and SVP for Legal Sector Rodolfo del Rosario Jr. denied the charges of fraud and corruption the Senate recommended the filing of charges against them including Health Secretary Francisco Duque III, and other officials of the agency for alleged multi-billion peso anomalies.

For his part, Benjamin “BEN” Punongbayan, Founder of the illustrious Punongbayan & Araullo Accounting Firm and Chairman of Buklod, a national political party, suggested that privatization of the part of the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) would prevent corruption in the agency and arrest imminent bankruptcy and would serve its mandate to ensure a sustainable national health insurance program for all.

“The big-scale corruption has hit hard on PhilHealth, the centerpiece of the country’s universal care system. Realistically, it will take a long time to unravel the scope and extent of that corruption”, according to Punongbayan. “What is more important at this stage is how to minimize, if not prevent, future corruption. That task will prove to be very difficult mainly because of the prevailing national attitude of benign neglect of corruption in government, he added.

Punongbayan said that a more effective measure, under the circumstances, is to privatize a substantial part of Philhealth’s activities. For this matter, Buklod advocates and supports the privatization of government functions to the extent doing so is possible.

Interestingly, a bill has been filed in the House by Deputy House Speaker and Marikina Rep. Miro. Quimbo proposing the privatization of Philhealth, although the bill did not specify how the privatization should be done. But just the same, Buklod supports a move towards this direction.

On a broad view, Punongbayan asserts that at the minimum the activities that should be privatized are the processing of claims and delivery of payments. The government may continue to handle the approval and preparation of payments. In this way, there is a check and balance that will minimize, if not prevent, corruption. The collection of members’ contributions may continue to be handled by the government, although this function may also be privatized the collected funds, as well as government fiscal appropriations, will continue to be under government control.

Officials of the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) face another series of legislative inquiries on fresh corruption allegations against its officials — for the nth time.

PhilHealth officers may have gotten used to attending congressional probes for various charges over the years. Some of them have been repeatedly accused, quizzed, and charged, but they never learn.

Remember the ghost dialysis scandal in 2019, and the P150-billion funds reportedly missing last June? Just how many times have they been subjected to severe congressional grilling, I’ve lost count!

Fraud allegations have consistently hounded PhilHealth, and the cycle never ends. Yes, even in this time of the pandemic.

The new revelation came last Thursday, following a heated Zoom meeting among the state agency’s officials.

Soon after, PhilHealth’s anti-fraud officer Thorrsson Montes Keith filed his resignation. Two more officers reportedly followed suit, with Keith citing widespread corruption in the agency and other reasons for quitting his post.

After Keith’s resignation, new corruption allegations against PhilHealth surfaced, including the agency’s alleged overpriced P2-billion information and technology project and its Interim Reimbursement Mechanism (IRM) meant to support the government’s response against COVID-19 crisis.

AnaKalusugan Party-list Representative Mike Defensor’s House Committee on Public Accounts would conduct a motu-proprio investigation on these issues.

Senator Panfilo Lacson and Senate President Tito Sotto filed on Monday Senate Resolution No. 475 to probe the “alleged rampant corruption, incompetence, and inefficiency” in PhilHealth.

It would include the IRM, through which PhilHealth has the authority to provide special privilege in the form of substantial aid to eligible Health Care Institutions (HCIs).

In a radio interview, Lacson revealed that the agency released P207 million to a few non-accredited hospitals in Region 5 in a matter of two weeks, and another P196 million to Region 8 in just a week. These occurred while many hospitals with several COVID-19 patients in other regions were pleading for reimbursements from PhilHealth.

For this and other corruption allegations that Keith was expected to disclose, Lacson wanted erring PhilHealth officials jailed this time.

In his two-page letter to PhilHealth President-CEO Ricardo Morales dated July 26, he accused the state agency’s chief of being the “coddler or the new leader of the syndicate in PhilHealth”.

Aside from these legislative inquiries, Malacanang ordered the Office of the Special Assistant to the President to investigate the agency’s alleged overpriced IT project.

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PhilHealth is sick to the bone. Continuing its series of purported fraud schemes during a pandemic is horrific. Apparently, it remains infected by the virus called corruption.

Are we only capable of “medicating” PhilHealth to treat the symptoms of corruption? Isn’t there a vaccine that could prevent a recurrence of this financial and moral virus?

I am eager to see these questions answered in a Senate or House hearing, or in a Palace probe.

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