PhilHealth Band’s ‘Charity’ Concert
When Sen. Juan Miguel Zubiri revealed the more corruption allegations involving the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth), an insurance company already plagued with issues in the past, claiming that the state-run company already lost 154 billion pesos since 2013, we are understandably upset (in fact, ‘upset’ is an understatement) — with all these happening amid such a crucial time for insurance companies, the ones that are supposed to help the populace mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and not pocket the money that people desperately need as of current.
I could not help but think that these arising issues are like an already-hated band announcing a charity concert in poor countries, except that they are flexing their wealth on their gigs to the impoverished population. With this scenario, if PhilHealth were indeed a band, their members would receive some of the highest pay around, with their technical team alone receiving tons of excess fund for their laptops and programs, while their fans or contributors continue to deal with their own problems. In fact, a former PhilHealth board member Alejandro Cabading told Pres. Rodrigo Duterte in his resignation letter that the budget for the information sector of the company is ‘bloated’ from what has been approved by the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT).
A group of internal auditors revealed that the price of the “Adobe Master Collection” was only P168,000 per unit — far from the allotted PhilHealth’s budget of 21 million pesos. However, note that the Adobe Master Collection was discontinued years ago by Adobe, selling the newer “Creative Cloud Suite” in its place, and the only other way to get a copy of the Adobe Master Collection is by pirating it, in which case there is no budget needed for it at all. Furthermore, Cabading compared the budget of PhilHealth’s ICT sector to what has been approved by the DICT, with a few items such as portable WiFi hotspots and fraud analytic tools not even in DICT’s approved Information Systems Strategic Plan. While it is true that ICT sectors contain some of the highest-paying jobs around, that is still an excess amount of money that goes into single programs that could have been used to provide the much-needed benefits of the people amid the crisis.
What especially angers me is the fact that even amidst all this, PhilHealth still has the guts to ask for more funding from the government — many times already. Add to this the fact that PhilHealth’s senior executives suddenly and suspiciously reported serious illnesses, including PhilHealth CEO and President Ricardo Morales who had been reported to have cancer as these issues flared on.
These sudden ‘sicknesses’ are suspiciously timed with the ongoing Senate probe, PhilHealth revealing that he ought to submit his medical certificate so that he could attend the hearing virtually. However, I could not help but ask why he still holds the presidency of PhilHealth against medical advice. These gestures tell me that Morales does not intend to step down anytime soon amid corruption issues — after all, if he had not stepped down against medical advice, I do not think arising corruption issues will make them hold accountability for the fraud that cost billions of money — THE money that people entrusted them with for their gigs.
Worse, the fact that the PhilHealth board members knew all along is especially infuriating. Cabading revealed that he had tried to bring these anomalous budget reports to the board, but the management seemed to be ‘tolerating’ these actions through their inaction against these executive officers, and has only been revealed now, in the time when people needed to rely on PhilHealth the most amid the pandemic crisis.
It is a punch to the face for these poor people, really, as PhilHealth continues their ‘charity concert’ to the impoverished Filipino populace, flexing their accumulated money from the bloated budgets. If PhilHealth were a musical band, I bet they would make good pianists due to how fast they would type those extra zeroes in the budget, and good singers too as they keep singing the same thing — that they have done nothing wrong. It is just saddening that the band ended up like this — PhilHealth intended to help the people with their financial woes especially in times of a health crisis like COVID-19. However, their charitable aim for their ‘gig’ has been overshadowed by the fact that their budgets had extra zeroes in them, essentially flexing their money in what is supposed to be a concert with a ‘charitable’ cause in front of the impoverished population.
REFERENCES:
https://rappler.com/.../official-says-philhealth-proposed...
https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/.../coa-flags-overpriced...
https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/.../zubiri-uncovers-more...
https://rappler.com/.../list-corruption-controversies...
https://www.onenews.ph/philhealth-officials-face-p15...
https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/.../philhealths-morales...
https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/.../2-top-philhealth-execs...
