Dear Philhealth,
Do you think it’s fair to ask OFWs for contributions that they CANNOT use at all?
Do you really think all OFWs can afford this? If they’re getting 20k/month, after food, rent, taxes, bills, health insurance, and money to support their families in the Philippines, how much is left?!
Do you think it’s sustainable for a 0.5% increase per year?? Do you think employers are that generous that there’s a salary increase of 0.5% each year?? Is it fair that their salary increase is going to something they cannot use rather than to improve their lives?
Now to the more detailed questions, let’s take your 7,488/year contribution for example (remember this is on the conservative side, a lot of people will be paying 21,600/year), according to Philippine Statistics Authority, there are 2.3M OFWs. That amounts to 17.2 BILLION pesos per year. This is a HUGE amount of money, the least you can do is tell us how the money will be spent.
How did you magically come up with 3% (17.2B, is 1% enough? is 0.5% enough? Has this been responsibly budgeted with Filipino health in mind?
How much percent is going to cancer treatments?
Dialysis?
Diabetes treatment? Etc.
And don’t give us bullshit numbers. Give us details. For example, how many cancer patients will benefit from this and how much in pesos is Philhealth going to cover?
Yeah, you didn’t think that far ahead right? Because my fear is, this money will be mismanaged just like in the past. In 2016, Philhealth had a 250M deficit. In 2017, 4B deficit. (I can’t find the figures after that, I’m sure someone can).
Is the OFW contributions going to cover your outstanding debts from hospitals?
Are we being used to correct your past mistakes? Is that fair?
Is the money going to be spent on hotel stays just like Celestina Dela Serna did in 2018? She spent 1.3M in a year just by staying in a hotel, are we paying for that mistake?!
And how about the 16.58M missing from OFW contributions?
In Feb 2020, a whistleblower Ken Sarmiento said that 4 Philhealth officials did not remit 16.58M from OFW contributions and that an estimated 50-100M is missing from OFW contributions. A day after the news came out, Philhealth President Ricardo Morales said that only 1.2M was missing and that recruitment agencies were to blame, that this was reported to the NBI since 2015. (now bear with me) My question is, yes you investigated the 1.2M but isn’t anyone questioning, where is the 16M to 100M? I don’t believe that Ken Sarmiento is making this up. Are we going to believe one person who says yeah nah, it’s fine, it’s only 1.2M. Is this being thoroughly investigated? 16M is not a joke, it’s a huge amount of money and this is a serious allegation.
Will the same thing happen to our 17.2B OFW contributions? Will it disappear into thin air?
To all Filipinos and OFWs out there, we should fight this and demand ANSWERS. Philippines still has a BIG corruption problem and a broken health care system and I fear that only a small percentage of the OFW contributions will actually benefit Filipinos who need it. I’m a citizen here in New Zealand, and because of this news, sadly I will not be processing my dual citizenship. I’m fortunate because I have an escape but for OFWs working in HK, Singapore, UAE etc. who can’t get citizenship, we should all fight for them as well.
Please share this post, sign the petition, it already reached 300k. However, the more support the better. This is the only way I know how to support OFWs, if you have any other ideas, please comment below and with all of us fighting, we can actually change this. Thanks for reading.
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