Senator Panfilo Lacson said on Saturday he would scrutinize the Philippine National Police’s (PNP) use of its taxpayer-funded hospital for high-profile detainees, questioning what he called a familiar pattern of influential figures being hospitalized just as arrest warrants are served.

Lacson spoke as former Public Works Secretary Manuel Bonoan and Senator Rodante Marcoleta remained confined at the Philippine National Police General Hospital following their arrest on Sandiganbayan-issued warrants in a plunder case involving alleged anomalies in government flood control projects. Bonoan also faces graft charges.

“Since time immemorial, when a prominent personality is cited in contempt or faces arrest, he or she suddenly gets sick and needs to be hospitalized,” Lacson said in a radio interview, arguing that the phenomenon has become so common that many Filipinos now expect it whenever powerful officials face detention.

Accountability clouded

The former police chief, now serving his second stint in the Senate, said the issue was no longer simply about the medical conditions of detainees but about public accountability.

“The PNP General Hospital is funded by taxpayers and is intended for PNP personnel and their dependents,” he said. “Who is paying for the confinement and medication of Bonoan and Marcoleta? As far as I know, neither of them are PNP dependents.”

Lacson said he would raise the matter during Senate deliberations on the proposed 2027 budgets of the PNP and the Department of the Interior and Local Government, seeking a full accounting of who is authorized to use the facility and who bears the cost when non-beneficiaries are admitted.

He also questioned reports that some police personnel and their qualified dependents had been unable to secure admission because of limited hospital capacity while non-police detainees were being accommodated.