Despite the clamor of concerned stakeholders, lawmakers and health advocates, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. justified the zero-budget allocation for the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) in the 2025 national budget.

During the budget deliberations, lawmakers did not allocate any funds to the national health insurer due to its failure to utilize funds that had been allocated to it in the previous years.

In an interview with Palace reporters, Marcos explained that PhilHealth has P600 billion in reserve funds which is more than enough to fund its service offerings in a year.

“The cost to provide their services in one year is less than P100 billion. So their budget actually for expenditure is in the P260 billion… P100 plus billion,” he said.

He said that if the government gave PhilHealth a subsidy, it would only stay in its bank accounts instead of being utilized and given to its members and other patients in need.

“The reason we do not want to subsidize is because the subsidy will just sit in PhilHealth’s bank account; it will not be used [but] we have other things to fund so that’s the simple explanation there. They have sufficient funds to carry on,” Marcos said.

Processing capacity problem

Marcos noted that PhilHealth is not facing any monetary problems, nor in providing care services or insurance coverage, but rather the problem in its system since it has expanded its benefits.

“The problem is, if you look at the reports, with the number of new services PhilHealth is providing, with the number of new payments PhilHealth is providing, the system is becoming clogged,” he said.

He said that in the provinces, people struggle to claim their benefits due to systemic problems.

“You can see there are, in the provinces, there are people waiting all day long, lines reaching two hundred people waiting to claim [their insurance]. It’s not difficult. But that’s what happened in PhilHealth. That’s the problem with PhilHealth. The problem is the processing capacity,” he added.

Marcos stressed that one of the priorities of PhilHealth now is the digitalization of the agency to enable it to continue providing services, attend to insurance claims, and at the same time speed up processes.

The P6.352-trillion General Appropriations Bill is currently under review at the Office of the President. Marcos has set the tentative date of 20 December to sign the budget proposal.