PHILIPPINE Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth), by its functions, is supposed to take good care of the Filipino people in terms of health. It should lessen our financial worries to maintain good health. The company is the government's way of saying it values the health of the citizenry especially the poor. Yet in another explosion of a corruption case amidst the pandemic, the Filipinos can only shake their head in shock and disbelief, and wonder where on earth these cold-blooded scammers got the heart to steal its money?
Apparently, some PhilHealth officials pocketed billions of the people's contributions. The current investigation of the senate presents us with glaring schemes of how they do it. They would do the most filthy and repulsive ways of stealing; from falsifying documents (a simple cough is declared as pneumonia on paper to obtain larger claims; a 7.3 million claim was recorded as 73 million) to procuring overpriced equipment. You can call it disheartening, I call it notorious and evil.
It was initially assessed that they took an estimated 15 billion peso from the corporation but as the senate inquiry drags on, we are having a wider view of the full scale of the thievery. The corruption loss could be around P100 billion or it could reach P200 billion. It is huge. Ordinary folks can only dream of having a million bucks to live by in their lifetime. The robbers in PhilHealth would not stop until they drain the collections of the agency. It is greed at its best.
I could not think of a more horrible crime than robbing the country at the time when its people are experiencing one of the most difficult times of their lives. A grandmother has to fall in line at 8 p.m. for the next day's distribution of financial assistance. This is an indication of how desperate people are to obtain money for their daily sustenance.
The pandemic has battered us to the ground. People are running out of money because they have lost their jobs. Government assistance will soon stop because according to the president our resources are crumbling. The billions lost in the hands of these few individuals could be of significant assistance to countless beneficiaries. But it would not happen because as we agonize the impact of the pandemic, here are our officials ransacking the vault of their own offices.
There was an investigation of corruption in PhilHealth in the last years that resulted in the indictment of the owner of a dialysis center and whistleblowers of estafa through falsification of official documents but there was no overhaul in the management of the corporation. The officials continued their crime and they came up with other schemes to haul cash. Today, employees hope that this new investigation will eradicate the corrupt system of the agency by removing the rotten individuals working in it.
Corrupt officials deserve the most severe penalty because of the crime's impact on people. We are a poor country and corruption this massive is one of the reasons why we are having a difficult time getting out of this hole. Is PhilHeath our partner in health? It should be, but right now it is hard to tell. As long as crooked officials run the corporation and other employees embrace a vow of silence, PhilHealth will never be the partner in health we deserve to have.