PhilHealth has proven itself as the most mismanaged government-owned and controlled corporation. The wrong people were entrusted with the very vital task of managing the national health in a corporation with too many senior vice presidents and even more vice presidents, senior managers, and glorified clerks who are getting outrageous salaries, allowances, and bonuses, for either sleeping on their jobs or betraying the trust of the people.
The billions of PhilHealth funds that were apparently squandered due to either corruption or plain incompetence, could have been enough to respond to the COVID crisis, and were it not for the incompetence and dishonesty of its officials, the government would not have had to quickly address the need to pass Bayanihan One and Bayanihan Two, appropriating billions again from tax money to be shouldered by the poor and the powerless. In the face of all these controversies, Francisco Duque should be decent enough to tender his immediate, unconditional and irrevocable resignation. The president, General Morales and the senior vice president for legal have already resigned. What is the chairman waiting for? Is he waiting to be fired?
If PhilHealth were a patient, it is suffering from the most serious COVID infection, exacerbated by an acute inflammation of the heart, and an incurable cardio-pulmonary disease, and an extreme case of brain cancer, stage five. I am not a doctor but, in my parlance, this patient must be given the last sacraments, because no matter what remedial interventions are applied, its maladies are beyond medication. There had been a series of changes in leadership, among the doctors attending to it, but, in the words of Morales himself, even if the president would put Superman there, the patient is beyond resuscitation. If you ask me, this patient needs a mercy killing.
Here are my diagnoses of PhilHealth. First, the wrong officials were appointed without screening them for competence, character, commitment, and conscientiousness. This a major HR blunder, appointing the wrong persons for the right positions, or the right persons for the wrong positions. And the Civil Service Commission should be held answerable, together with the PhilHealth appointing powers, for mysteriously lowering or adjusting the qualification standards, of high officials, just to accommodate the chairman of PhilHealth who, by strange coincidence, happened to be the immediate past chairman of the Civil Service. Second, there are many financial blunders. The controls were not in place and COA should be answerable because it has a resident auditor who was apparently not doing his job.
Third, there was an operational blunder. They created an Interim Reimbursement Mechanism but in contradiction, irresponsibly and recklessly gave many millions as cash advances to favored hospitals. They were either unable to control fraud committed by certain unscrupulous doctors and hospitals or were in conspiracy to bleed the PhilHealth treasury billions of funds. They were biased in favor of private medical centers and were ignoring the public health institutions where the poor Filipinos are in dire need of help. The reason is very obvious. It is more difficult to manipulate documents in government hospitals. In the private sectors, there are many willing conspirators.
If I were the president or Congress, the best and the only acceptable solution to the PhilHealth fiasco is to abolish it, assign its functions to the SSS and GSIS while a new more competent and more honest institution can be created. PhilHealth is beyond repair, even if the newly appointed president were a superman. He is bound to fail too. His designation is just a band-aid solution to a gangrenous malady.