SC asked to void 2025 budget for excluding our PhilHealth

Health is our right, and must be affordable to us all.

But government gave nothing for PhilHealth this 2025, and even deleted it from the national budget.

So 37 million indigents will have no health insurance and must cut into monthly contributions of 66 million paying members.

Yet, government directors are promising quintupled benefits which PhilHealth cannot afford, and will crash it.

The Supreme Court was thus asked yesterday to nullify RA 12116, the General Appropriations Act of 2025. The petition wants the SC to bar Congress and Malacañang from implementing the flawed budget.

Senate President Francis Escudero, House Speaker Martin Romualdez and Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin are being made to answer.

Petitioner health care advocate Dr. Tony Leachon points up two violations of the Constitution and of the PhilHealth law.

Last year the Senate and House of Reps transferred to pork barrels PhilHealth’s original P74-billion allocation. With Malacañang’s consent, nothing was left for citizens’ health insurance.

On July 29, President Bongbong Marcos proposed P74 billion as PhilHealth’s automatic share from sin taxes on alcohol, tobacco and sweets. The House approved it on third reading on Sept. 25 and the Senate on Nov. 27.

But the bicameral conference committee of two secretly transferred the P74 billion to pork barrels in the form of flood works and political “ayuda.”

Senators and congressmen hastily ratified the bicam report without public hearing. BBM went along with it by signing the budget into law.

When critics got wind of the anomaly, Escudero alibied that they were punishing then-PhilHealth president Emmanuel Ledesma for incompetence.

Escudero and House counterparts could not explain why, in punishing Ledesma, they deprived indigents of state health insurance.

Escudero and other senators even claimed that PhilHealth was awash in excess funds.

Yet, SC Justice Amy Lazaro-Javier disproved them in another case on PhilHealth.

“PhilHealth is bankrupt,” she declared. “The Commission on Audit has repeatedly highlighted that in its letters to PhilHealth … the reserve fund of PhilHealth is much, much less than its actuarial fund, actuarial estimates.”

State-run PhilHealth is every Filipinos’ personal health insurance. It began in 1995 with monthly mandatory contributions from wage earners. In 2019 the Universal Health Care Act obligated parts of sin taxes to PhilHealth for indigents.

Leachon’s petition slams the Legislative and Executive for breaching:

• Article II, Declaration of State Principles, Section 15: “The State shall protect and promote the right to health of the people and instill health consciousness among them.”

• Article XIII, Social Justice and Human Rights, Section 11: “The State shall adopt an integrated and comprehensive approach to health development which shall endeavor to make essential goods, health and other social services available to all the people at affordable cost. There shall be priority for the needs of the under-privileged, sick, elderly, disabled, women and children. The State shall endeavor to provide free medical care to paupers.”

• The UHCA, which specifies the percentage of sin taxes that should go to PhilHealth.

Leachon’s petition states: “The actions of the bicameral conference committee, composed of Romualdez and Escudero, and ES Bersamin reflect not only an abuse of power but a grave abdication of their sworn duty to uphold the welfare of every Filipino.

“This betrayal was done behind closed doors, without public scrutiny and without a shred of compassion for those whose lives depend on this essential support.”

PhilHealth’s constitutional woes began with the 2024 budget. Four separate SC petitions were filed last year by:

• Minority Reps. Edcel Lagman (+), Mujiv Hataman and Gabriel Bordado to outlaw the P450-billion pork barrel in the 2024 budget. To fund that pork, Finance Sec. Ralph Recto ordered the transfer of P90 billion from PhilHealth to the Bureau of Treasury.

• Ex-Reps. Neri Colmenares, Teddy Casiño, Carlos Zarate and Ferdinand Gaite to nullify BBM’s certification of urgency to enact the 2024 budget (which he repeated with the 2025 budget).

• Senate minority leader Koko Pimentel, health care reformist Dr. Minguita Padilla, UP economics Prof. Cielo Magno and the 93,000-strong Philippine Medical Association, among others, to stop the P90-billion diversion.

• Former SC justices Antonio Carpio and Conchita Carpio-Morales, Prof. Magno, ex-COA commissioner Heidi Mendoza, lawyer Howard Calleja and senior citizens to stop PhilHealth from transferring the last P30-billion tranche of the total P90 billion to the Treasury, and to return the first P60 billion.

A fifth SC petition was filed Feb. 10 by ex-speaker Pantaleon Alvarez and ex-Rep. Isidro Ungab questioning blank items in the enrolled General Appropriations Bill. A congress secretariat allegedly filled in the blanks with hundred-billion-peso amounts without final review by senators and congressmen.

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