For the Board to remove the penalty of revocation or suspension of accreditation is amending an existing law which only Congress can do.

One thing is certain. If you are a Filipino and have had the opportunity to live in Europe, you will know what universal health care is and you will value it. While I am now in the United States for a 10-day holiday to contemplate what I will do until the next elections in 2022, I spent time in Europe for work and had the opportunity to confer with Filipinos there. In particular, I had the chance to meet with members of the DDS Vienna who had nothing but appreciation for the Universal Health Care Law that we shepherded through Congress and even in Malacañang. I know about UHC and experienced it as a student when I did my Masters of Law in England. I was pleasantly surprised then that after registering with my community nurse in the place where I lived, I got my one-month supply for insulin and Glucophage for only £5. All my diagnostic, including quarterly blood testing, were also free. Today, most Filipinos in Europe would acknowledge that while they pay 32 percent in income taxation, they have no complaints because it already covers free health care and free education for their children all the way to college. I could not help but smile knowing that in my year-and-a-half in Congress, not only did I pass the UHC, which I patterned after the UK’s National Health Service, but also authored the free lunch programs for malnourished children in our schools, free irrigation, and free tuition in state colleges and universities, all of which I patterned after the democratic socialist countries of Europe. Of course, our hope is that our laws will be implemented correctly so that, in a decade, we would have the same benefits as the Europeans.

Talking about implementing the UHC, my blood pressure shot up to the roof when I heard the defense of the Philippine Health Insurance Corp.’s (PhilHealth) defense of the Perpetual Succor Hospital case, which was the basis for our first ever-criminal complaint against the highest officials of the company. This was the case where the Accreditation Committee of PhilHealth meted the sanction of three months suspension of the hospital’s accreditation for a proven case of overstaying, or where patients were made to stay in the hospital despite a doctor’s may-go-home order. The matter was appealed to the Court of Appeals, which upheld the sanction. According to the CA, overstays constitute a malum prohibitum and hence, it matters not that there was no malice in the infraction. The PhilHealth Board, including its former president, Dr, Roy Ferrer, purportedly implementing a new set of implementing rules and regulation for the PhilHealth act, decided to do away with the penalty of revocation or suspension of accreditation and limited sanctions to mere fines. If I’m not mistaken, Perpetual Succor Hospital was fined a couple of hundred thousand. But because the Board overruled, in effect, the final and executory ruling of the CA, the hospital was able to collect no less than P37 million a month or at least a whopping P100 million for the three months that its accreditation was supposed to be suspended.

The PhilHealth officials justified their overturning of the final decision of the CA on the ground that the Board has the power to issue implementing rules and regulations. Could they?

The law that I learned in the University of the Philippines says no. In our scheme of government, Congress provides the policy, while the Executive implements the law. When the law says the penalty shall be from revocation of suspension of accreditation and fines, that means the implementing agency can impose either or both, depending on the infraction. For the Board to remove the penalty of revocation or suspension of accreditation is amending an existing law which only Congress can do. Moreover, it seems the PhilHealth Board violated its own unconstitutional rules since its own rules says it could not be given retroactive effect or when already adjudicated by the courts.

Oh well, this I can promise the Board and officials of PhilHealth — I will send them reading materials on good governance when they spend time in jail. Meanwhile, I remain steadfast in my duty as a private citizen to ensure the correct and judicious enforcement of our Universal Health Care Law. Let’s rid PhilHealth of its scalawags.