Opinion

After PhilHealth, they can loot SSS, GSIS, AFP-PNP savings

GOTCHA - Jarius Bondoc - The Philippine Star

August 9, 2024 | 12:00am

We SSS and GSIS members, beware. Also soldiers and policemen.

After taking our PhilHealth’s P90 billion, government can get our pensions and savings too.

SSS and GSIS are specified in the memo that transferred our P90-billion PhilHealth money to politicos’ pork barrels.

AFPSLAI, or Armed Forces and Police Savings and Loans Association Inc. and the like, are implied in the memo.

Finance Sec. Ralph Recto’s Feb. 27, 2024 circular says it all. It calls our money “government-owned and -controlled” via mumbo jumbo like “Government Financial Institutions,” “Government Instrumentalities with Corporate Powers,” “Government Corporate Entities.”

It twists the truth that SSS, GSIS, AFPSLAI, like PhilHealth, are money of members – not government’s.

It all began with politicos’ mangling of the 2024 national budget. They put P245 billion in ghost flood works, which they can pocket in full. Plus, billions more in Charter change to prolong their dynasties.

Then, they tripled Malacañang’s P282-billion unprogrammed budget to P732 billion.

They will plunder the additional P450 billion – a billion for each supermajority lawmaker.

Since the P450 billion is yet unprogrammed, they are taking cash from GOCCs, GFIs, GICPs and GCEs.

PhilHealth’s Malacañang-appointed officers relented. On May 10, CEO Emmanuel Ledesma gave DOF’s Bureau of Treasury P20 billion and promised P70 billion more in three installments.

Next up are SSS, GSIS, AFPSLAI and other “paluwagan” in the Army, Navy and Air Force.

Recto’s memo defines GFIs as “financial institutions or corporations in which government directly or indirectly owns majority of capital stock and which are either:

“(1) registered with or directly supervised by Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas; or

“(2) collecting or transacting funds or contributions from the public and places them in financial instruments or assets such as deposits, loans, bonds and equity including, but not limited to, GSIS and SSS.”

Under item-1, government can take 619,859 AFPSLAI members’ P17.87-billion income in 2023. As well, from “paluwagan” of coastguards, firemen, prison and jail guards and mappers.

AFPSLAI’s website says it’s a “private, non-stock, non-profit savings and loan association established and registered with Securities and Exchange Commission in 1972.”

It adds: “Supervised by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, AFPSLAI promotes industry, frugality and savings among members from the AFP, PNP, BFP, BJMP and civilian employees.”

It doesn’t matter that AFPSLAI is private. DOF’s catch-all phrase “supervised by BSP” opens it to robbery like PhilHealth. More so since it holds office inside military and police camps.

SSS, GSIS and PhilHealth are also private funds of contributors, dependents and retirees.

Yet government robbed PhilHealth. It attempted to rob SSS and GSIS last year for the Marcos admin’s vanity Maharlika Fund. It backed off when we SSS-GSIS members growled.

SSS’s 43 million members grossed P353.82 billion in 2023; GSIS’s 2.6 million members, P311.3 billion.

Hungrier than ever, politicos are salivating. Filing of candidacies for Election 2025 is on Oct. 1-8. Campaign starts February for May 2025 balloting. They want to use our cash to buy votes for seven months.

After taking PhilHealth’s P90 billion, government dug in its heels.

Malacañang and Congress ignored widespread protests. Doctors, academics, urban poor, laborers, self-employed, feminists and retirees didn’t matter to them.

President Bongbong Marcos shunned that hottest issue in his State of the Nation. Lawmakers chanted “BBM! BBM!” on his closure of sleazy POGOs. Yet the bigger corruption is their collusion in diverting PhilHealth members’ money to pork barrels.

All 119 million Filipinos, as PhilHealth members, are victims. They are of two types:

• Obligatory monthly contributors, dependents and retirees who paid since PhilHealth’s 1995 founding;

• Indigents subsidized by sin taxes on tobacco, alcohol and sugary drinks under the 2019 Universal Health Care Act.

Government calls the P90-billion “excess fund.” That’s virtual admission of lawbreaking.

UHCA’s Section 11 states: “[any] excess PhilHealth reserve fund shall be used to increase the Program’s benefits and to decrease the amount of members’ contributions.

“No portion of the reserve fund or income thereof shall accrue to the general fund of the National Government or its agencies or instrumentalities.”

After forcibly increasing contributions last January, CEO Ledesma now offers to reduce them. Recto, a PhilHealth board director, opposes him.

That shows they have no strategy.