SO, THE Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) filed a graft complaint against former Health secretary Janette Garin and former PhilHealth president Alexander Padilla in connection with the alleged diversion of P10.69 billion meant for senior citizens to the construction of rural health clinics in 2015.
It’s interesting to see how this issue will develop. Garin already denied the charge and claimed such amount of money was nonexistent.
For now, let us focus on one major PhilHealth concern: adequate health care coverage for senior citizens, or more specifically the lack of it. According to Rep. Milagros Aquino-Magsaysay of the Senior Citizen party-list, insufficient budget has excluded millions of senior citizens from PhilHealth coverage.
The Mandatory PhilHealth Coverage for Senior Citizens Act (Republic Act 10645) mandates the universal coverage of the Filipino elderly above 60 years of age as automatically enrolled in the national health insurance agency. Proceeds of RA 10351, the Sin Tax Law, were meant to finance the coverage. But upon the first enactment of RA 10645 in 2015, two million eligible senior citizen beneficiaries were excluded from the total budget allocation for enrollment as mandated by the Mandatory PhilHealth Coverage Act.
The total premium allocation for the RA 10645 under the National Expenditure Program proposed by the Department of Health for PhilHealth was a total of P6.7 billion, which only covers 2.8 million senior citizens under the program. But in 2015, the full implementation of the PhilHealth Primary Care Benefit Package to include senior citizen enrollees was deferred for unclear reasons.
Until now, the elderly enrollees of the national health insurance agency are not receiving the Primary Care Benefits afforded by them as announced in PhilHealth Circular No. 006-2015 (Implementing Guidelines for the Mandatory PhilHealth Coverage for Senior Citizens).
Implementation of the PhilHealth circular was supposed to formally include senior citizen enrollees for the Primary Care Benefit Package of the national health insurance agency, touted as “Tamang Serbisyo sa Kalusugan ng Pamilya” or “Tsekap”, which provides free outpatient check-ups and laboratory works for its enrollees.
Given these developments in the first few years of implementation of the Mandatory PhilHealth Coverage for Senior Citizens, we are concerned about the sustainability and the effectivity of the law.
There must be sufficient budget for the full implementation of RA 10654 and other health programs for the elderly to ensure that the most vulnerable segment of our society be guaranteed of health security.
