Senate Minority Leader Franklin M. Drilon is moving to totally scrap the controversial Interim Reimbursement Mechanism (IRM) scheme of the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) that, he noted, was earlier suspended in the wake of reports of irregularities.
The Senator suggested last Sunday that scrapping the IRM, which he described as a “mere cash advance” to hospitals, would “not and should not affect the services PhilHealth is mandated to provide under the law.”
This after PhilHealth officials opted to temporarily suspend the program amid the controversy.
The Senate Minority Leader said in a statement that even as the Department of Justice was tasked by President Duterte to look into allegations in PhilHealth involving alleged corruption schemes, “PhilHealth programs will not be affected even if we get rid of this IRM.”
He suggested that “PhilHealth will and should continue to pay for the hospitalization of Covid-19 patients even if we scrap this IRM fraught with irregularities.”
The Senator emphasized that PhilHealth should “speed up the reimbursement or payment of claims of the hospitals that treated Covid-19 patients but were excluded from the IRM and required the hospitals that received a total of P14.9 billion in cash advances to liquidate the funds immediately.”
Drilon earlier observed that “even the name ‘Interim Reimbursement Mechanism’ is a misnomer because this is not a system of reimbursement but an advance–one with very weak liquidation procedure.”
He pointed out that if hospitals were promptly paid, there would be no need for the system of releasing advances amounting to millions of pesos,” recalling that the creation of IRM was the result of “slow processing of payment claims’ in the agency.
Citing reports that PhilHealth owed hospitals around P18 billion in unpaid claims, the Senator suggested that “they should improve their system and reimburse the hospitals on time. Then, there is no need for this IRM,” adding that “hospitals are suffering from these delayed payments.”
“Yung mga hospitals hirap na, marami silang serbisyo na nagawa na at humihingi ng reimbursement.” he added. [The hospitals are already struggling. They have done a lot of services and are asking for reimbursement.]
At the same time, Drilon declared that Health Secretary Francisco T. Duque III “cannot escape liability being the chairman of PhilHealth,” recallng that “corruption has been going on under his nose for years yet we heard nothing from him. Did he do something to prevent it?”
The Senator added: “First of all, what did he do to lessen, if not totally eradicate, these corruption and frauds in PhilHealth?”
The Senate Minority Leader had earlier exposed the overpricing of PhilHealth Covid-19 test kits, prompting the health insurance agency to bring down the cost from P8,150 to P3,409. This saved the government over P9 billion, on the basis of a projected two million tests.