The Private Hospitals Association of the Philippines Inc. (PHAPI) is encouraging its members to observe a “PhilHealth holiday” in early January to protest delayed or unpaid claims by the state-owned health insurance company.
From Jan. 1 to Jan 5, PHAPI members are urged not to accept PhilHealth deductions for health services, PHAPI president Dr. Jose Rene De Grano said in an interview on ANC. He added that this was a show of support for other hospitals that were cutting ties with the Philippine Health Insurance Corp.
Seven private hospitals in Iloilo City have severed ties with PhilHealth effective Jan. 1 next year over debts of the government health insurance agency to the hospitals amounting to P895 million.
“It’s our decision to disengage this coming Jan. 1, 2022 and we are preparing for it,” Dr. Danny Encarnacion, president and CEO of Metro Iloilo Hospital & Medical Center Inc, told ABS-CBN’s TeleRadyo.
The other hospitals are Iloilo Doctors’ Hospital, Iloilo Mission Hospital, Medicus Medical Center, Qualimed Hospital Iloilo, St. Paul’s Hospital of Iloilo, and The Medical City of Iloilo.
Encarnacion said they had a meeting with the state health insurer on Dec. 20 but nothing came of it.
He said hospitals were against the PhilHealth Debit-Credit Payment Method (DCPM) because they have no say in it.
To date, Metro Iloilo Hospital & Medical Center Inc.’s collectibles with the state health insurer have reached P200 million, Encarnacion said.
In total, PhilHealth owes the seven hospitals some P895 million, he added.
Also on Monday, Senator Panfilo Lacson, a candidate for president, said the Universal Health Care Act is still underfunded by about P84 billion— a gap that must be addressed by the next administration to stop hospitals from leaving the state health insurance system for good and prevent the public from suffering even more amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Lacson raised this issue in a recent press conference in Lingayen, Pangasinan, as he noted that more private hospitals were cutting ties with PhilHealth over unpaid hospitalization claims that reached about P20 billion as of November.
The three-term senator noted the full implementation of the UHCA was crucial for the country to address the pandemic, which he said would be his priority if elected president.
“Our primary program, of course, is to address the pandemic. We have a Universal Health Care Act that was passed in 2018… Until now it is not fully funded, although it can be. Its full implementation is worth P257 billion but the fund allocated for it in 2022 is just P173 billion,” he said.
As one of the senators who passed the UHCA, Lacson wondered why the law could not be funded correctly, as a fully-funded health care act means that all barangays in the country would be covered and that there would be one hospital bed for every 800 population.
In contrast, 2020 statistics show that in the country’s poorest regions such as Mimaropa (Region 4B), the ratio was one hospital bed per 10,000 people – way below the proportion of one bed for every 1,000 prescribed by the World Health Organization (WHO).
