Duque tagged as ‘godfather’ of PhilHealth ‘mafia’

MANILA, Philippines — Whistleblowers and senior officials at the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) have tagged Health Secretary Francisco Duque III as the “godfather” of the alleged mafia in the state firm engaged in pocketing billions of pesos through various corruption schemes.

At the resumption yesterday of the Senate committee of the whole’s inquiry into alleged anomalies at PhilHealth, a former anti-fraud officer and a regional vice president on leave, testified that Duque either condoned or abetted various wrongdoings that led to PhilHealth’s precarious financial state today.

The committee, chaired by Senate President Vicente Sotto III with all senators as members, held its third hearing on various allegations against Duque, PhilHealth president Ricardo Morales and other officials. Also tackled at the hearing were the alleged favoritism in the disbursement of billions of pesos under the P27-billion Interim Reimbursement Mechanism (IRM), and the alleged overprice in the purchase of information technology (IT) equipment worth P2.1 billion.

As health chief, Duque chairs the PhilHealth board and has held various top posts at the agency in the last 18 years. Morales informed the panel in a letter to Sotto that he could not attend the hearing due to a medical appointment.

“I can consider that he (Duque) is the godfather of the mafia,” former PhilHealth anti-fraud officer Thorrsson Montes Keith said in Filipino upon questioning from Sen. Risa Hontiveros.

Keith was among those who reported irregularities in the IRM scheme where several favored hospitals and healthcare institutions (HCIs) were given hundreds of millions of pesos even if they had no or very few coronavirus disease patients.

The IRM was implemented to allow hospitals and HCIs to continue to cater to patients without fear of going into unmanageable debt or bankruptcy due to the pandemic, PhilHealth officials said.

“In the IRM, he (Duque) is the chairman, and as a chairman, he must do due diligence, considering that he’s also a (medical) doctor, and he has institutional knowledge in the operations of PhilHealth, he should have seen the anomalies. I’ve been only (with PhilHealth) for nine months, but immediately saw them,” Keith said.

Also testifying at the hearing was regional vice president Dennis Adre, who was among six PhilHealth senior officials who went on leave last week, and who presidential spokesman Harry Roque had described as not part of the “mafia.”

‘Good mafia’

Adre told the inquiry that he and other five other regional vice presidents who went on leave were members of the “good mafia” and the present members of the PhilHealth executive committee (execom) were the “bad mafia.”

He said the agency first suffered financial losses when Duque started “politicizing” PhilHealth’s funds in his “Plan 5 million” involving the distribution of five million cards among poor Filipinos supposedly to help in the presidential campaign of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2004.

He claimed that Duque specifically gave instructions that then Davao City mayor Rodrigo Duterte be excluded from the scheme as he did not belong to the administration party.

He also accused PhilHealth senior vice president for legal sector, Rodolfo del Rosario, of “consistently lying” at hearings at the Senate and the House of Representatives. Del Rosario is a member of the executive committee.

“In the past week, we have witnessed the frenzied justification and connivance of the execom to cover up the anomalies that we have uncovered,” Adre said.

“We are the ‘good mafia’… If we are to be called mafia for questioning flawed policies and illegal orders, they are the real bad mafia,” he said.

Duque branded the allegations of Keith and Adre as “malicious” and “without basis.”

“I do not wish to dignify that allegation,” Duque said, adding that all the complaints filed with the Office of the Ombudsman and the Commission on Elections were dismissed. “I really do not know your honor why they are making up this.”

Zero tolerance for graft – Duque

Duque maintained he does not tolerate corruption and wrongdoing in PhilHealth as he debunked allegations raised against him.

Duque, who chairs PhilHealth, testified via video conference for the first time before the Senate committee of the whole.

The health chief said PhilHealth was a program “very close to my heart” as its precursor—the Medicare—was the brainchild of his late father Francisco Duque Jr.

“Consequently, my commitment to safeguard the (PhilHealth) is very personal,” Duque told the committee. “I would like to state for the record that I’m for zero tolerance on graft and corruption.”

Duque has served at PhilHealth in various capacities for 18 years beginning in 2001. Senators said his long institutional memory should help shed light on the controversies besetting the state insurer.

He, along with PhilHealth president and CEO Morales – a retired military general – has been tagged as either condoning or abetting various wrongdoings in the state insurance firm.

He expressed respect for the committee’s “unflinching fight against corruption, the same way I remain unflinching in my battles, not only in the fight to protect my character as a public servant, but also in the fight to implement President Rodrigo Roa Duterte’s noble vision of genuine universal access to health care for all Filipinos and to ensure we come out of the pandemic healthy as a nation.”

He cited several reforms he pushed including data-driven operations to deter corruption, hiring more lawyers to pursue fraud cases even as he stressed that PhilHealth benefit payments were regularly, systematically and automatically released to hospitals and healthcare institutions with complete requirements.

“There is no such thing as a P154-billion loss,” Duque said, apparently referring to a previous statement of Presidential Anti-Corruption Commission Commissioner Greco Belgica.

He presented a June 10, 2020 letter from Commission on Audit chairman Michael Aguinaldo, confirming there was no such finding.

As for the alleged overprice in the acquisition of IT equipment, he said the board did not approve any release of funding for purchase but instead sought more details with instructions that such procurement must be aligned with reforms.

Senators took turns grilling Duque with Sen. Grace Poe saying he has “failed miserably” in his mandate, as shown by the glaring number of unaddressed cyclical corruption in the government health system.

In her remarks, Poe summed up that PhilHealth is similar to a patient with cancer, plagued by corruption and inefficiency through the years, that has endangered the fund life of the agency.

Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon at the start of the hearing said he regretted not signing Resolution 362 last April calling for Duque’s resignation.

“Your poor health management has resulted in the longest lockdown in the world. Unfortunately our Secretary of Health has failed to manage the pandemic and its curve,” Drilon said.