Marcos’ hijacking of PhilHealth funds part of broad plunder conspiracy

THIS administration’s depravity appears to have no bounds. What kind of president is this who would hijack funds intended for his constituents’ health care, in order to generate kickbacks for himself, his allies and corrupt officials and contractors as well as to bribe 215 representatives to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte on the flimsiest of grounds?

President Marcos collaborated with his cousin, the then House speaker Martin Romualdez in 2023–2024, to illegally hijack P90 billion of the Philippine Health Insurance Corp.’s (PhilHealth) reserve funds, to build up a huge war chest devoted to one purpose.

This was to finance the now notorious “insertion” projects, such as those for ghost flood-control projects that generated billions of kickbacks for themselves. It also gave Marcos’ government the fiscal leeway to allocate funds to bribe the Congress representatives through government’s dole-out projects that they were given the authority to direct.

Only in the past several months have whistleblowers and testimonies in government agency investigations unearthed the fact that a good portion of these funds allegedly ended up in Marcos’ and Romualdez’s pockets as kickbacks — even delivered to their houses in suitcases — and in those of corrupt politicians and public works department officials.

This is the conclusion one would get from the 150-page Dec. 3 unanimous decision of the Supreme Court on cases filed by three different groups (General Resolutions 274778, 275405 and 276233) declaring the PhilHealth funds hijacking illegal and unconstitutional.

The decision’s tone was naturally angry. The Court’s ponente (writer of the decision) Associate Justice Amy Lazaro-Javier in her introduction to her ruling related a heart-tugging tv news feature narrating the story of a working-class patient who was billed P400,000 for his stroke that paralyzed half his body and diabetes-caused leg amputation, and who however still fell short, after exhausting loans from friends and distant relatives, by P65,000. His family is now deeply indebted for life, even as he is unable to get much work because of his disabilities. It’s a sad story most Filipinos have heard of from relatives and friends, with the fact that the Philippines has the best hospitals in Asia making it more tragic.

Yet the rulers of this country, particularly the billionaires Marcos and Romualdez, chose to raid the PhilHealth’s funds for their political motives, or purportedly to further enrich themselves by billions of pesos. In fact, one expert witness to the deliberations of the Court pointed out that the P90 billion that was ordered transferred to the Treasury in 2024 could pay for the average P46,400 hospitalization fees of 2 million Filipinos.

Vociferous

In her decision, Lazaro was vociferous in condemning the administration for its illegal move:

“Our people have waited long enough, suffered long enough, and hoped long enough. No more misdirection of funds and of priorities. The court will not sit idly by, not when the people look and cry to us for help, not when the Constitution charges us to be the singular indomitable bastion of our people’s rights. We will not be blind to their plight. And we certainly will not be callous to their agony.”

This Supreme Court decision — for which 12 justices even wrote long concurring decisions — documents a massive, unconstitutional diversion of the legally earmarked part of PhilHealth’s health funds into this administration’s politically driven flood control program, to feed a pork-rich public works machine riddled with ghost and substandard projects — and if former congressman Zaldy Co is proven to be truthful — to enrich the president and his cousin, Romualdez.

It shows a government so willing to raid the PhilHealth’s reserves which the Court called a “brazen” disregard of the people’s right to health, even as billions were siphoned to unprogrammed appropriations — most notably for flood control — whose political returns dwarf their development value. Co, Romualdez’s man who formulated and implemented the kickback scheme, asserted that in 2024 he personally delivered cash — in suitcases — Romualdez’s residences for delivery to Marcos, comprising portions of those kickbacks: P200 million on Dec. 2, 2024, and P800 million on another delivery. For 2025, Co claimed that the P100 billion in insertions put in the budget raised P25 billion in kickbacks for Marcos and Romualdez.

The hijacking of PhilHealth’s funds was indeed so cleverly diabolical that Ben Kritz, a columnist in this newspaper, couldn’t understand it, so he just claimed in his column yesterday that such criticism is mere black propaganda against the administration. Amazingly, Kritz didn’t read the news articles headlined Dec. 4 in almost all newspapers (except The Manila Times) on the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision, and lengthy explanations, declaring the hijacking of PhilHealth’s fund illegal and even unconstitutional.

To hide its diversion of PhilHealth funds, Marcos got Congress to insert Special Provision 1(d) of the 2024 General Appropriations Act, ordering all state firms to remit their so called “fund balance” to the Treasury to finance unprogrammed appropriations. In PhilHealth’s case, the Department of Finance computed an “excess” of P90 billion — supposedly idle and unutilized — and ordered its transfer in four tranches, of which P60 billion had already been remitted by late 2024.

Breakthrough

But as the Supreme Court unanimously ruled, Section 11 of the Universal Health Care Act of 2019 (UHCA) categorically prohibits this. Furthermore, the Court ruled that this law or any other law cannot be amended by a mere provision in the budget act.

The 2019 Universal Health Act is actually a breakthrough in our Republic’s primordial task of serving the people, and one of President Rodrigo Duterte’s lasting legacies. (That a nation can institute free medical care for every citizen has been long proven by Canada, the UK and Nordic countries in the early 1970s, China and Vietnam in the 2000s and 2010.)

To assure that there will “forever” be funds for our people’s medical care and hospitalization, the UHCA specified that its revenues in excess of the current year’s expenditures be declared as a reserve fund, that is for unexpected developments such as the outbreak of epidemics and huge casualties due to natural disasters. If the total amount of such reserves exceeds more than two years’ worth of program benefits, the excess is to be used to increase PhilHealth benefits and to decrease members’ contributions. If ever there are still funds left, the law allowed these to be invested but strictly following seven investment criteria ensuring its security and that these shall not exceed 10 percent of the total reserve fund.

Through this provision, Duterte and the 2019 Congress envisioned a situation in which Filipinos will eventually have to pay only minimal premiums, with PhilHealth paying for nearly all the costs of citizens’ hospitalization, as a few have been able to.

Even with these strict provisions, the law declared: “No portion of the reserve fund or income thereof shall accrue to the general fund of the National Government or to any of its agencies or instrumentalities, including government-owned or -controlled corporations.”

But that is exactly what Marcos and his gang did, helped by the bizarre definitions of then-Finance secretary Ralph Recto and his purported finance wizards at the DOF. He ordered PhilHealth to remit P90 billion to the national government, “co-mingled” with other funds (including the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ profits from the sale of 30 tons of gold in early 2024), to create a war chest for this administrations’ campaign against Vice President Sara Duterte and seed money for the ghost, substandard, or unfinished flood control projects disbursed in 2024.

Duterte

Part of these funds were obviously used to bribe the 250 representatives who signed the four impeachment complaints against VP Sara Duterte in December 2024 and January 2025 at P150 million per head, totaling P32 billion.

The Court said that the PhilHealth’s own data show that PhilHealth covers only about 40-45 percent of hospital bills, offers only 17 upgraded “Z” benefit packages (for cancer and other “dread” diseases) out of thousands of case rates, and covers a tiny fraction of essential outpatient diagnostics and drugs. Primary care and emergency services remain limited, fragmented and late in being rolled out, especially for the poor.

It also revealed that since PhilHealth’s total liabilities as of end 2024 exceeded total assets by over P600 billion, it is technically insolvent even as the finance department treated the build up of reserves as “idle.”

Yet Marcos and his gang still crafted a scheme to hijack PhilHealth’s funds. Marcos’ thinking, I would dare guess, was that if his clan had to end its rule in 2028 — i.e., with Sara presumably capturing power — he had to generate kickbacks as much as he could (P25 billion, delivered in 2024, Co claimed) in his remaining three years in power.

The Supreme Court also pointed out that the attempt at hijacking PhilHealth’s funds is part of the government’s larger conspiracy: Congress has been aggressively inflating unprogrammed appropriations since 2022, inserting hundreds of millions almost secretly in a way that “raises the suspicion” that they function as an elastic reservoir for politically brokered projects. The same trend appears in the successive budgets’ flood control envelopes: swelling allocations, largely in the form of small, scattered items that are notoriously prone to ghost, overlapping, or substandard implementation — exactly the kind of terrain where kickbacks thrive.

The picture that emerges is not of a technical error but of a deliberate budget plot: inflate unprogrammed appropriations, craft a rider allowing the president — acting through the finance department —to scrape “fund balances” from government firms, then tap PhilHealth’s reserves to underwrite the expanded pot that would finance a P700 billion unprogrammed space filled with infrastructure, flood control and other projects that legislators and Marcos and his gang can quietly load and release with minimal public scrutiny. PhilHealth’s P90 billion money was therefore a crucial part of the plot.

Indictment

The Supreme Court ruling is an indictment of corrupt governance that treats universal health care as just another government service to be raided to raise money for kickbacks.

Although hinting that a grave crime may have been committed in the hijacking of PhilHealth funds, the Court, however, pointed out that under the Constitution, the president cannot be sued during his or her tenure, regardless of a crime that arose from his or her official acts.

But Marcos can certainly be impeached, and after the nation realizes how brazen a betrayal of the nation this hijacking of the PhilHealth funds was, there would be momentum for such a move, or an extra-constitutional version, such as the military’s declaration of a “withdrawal of support” for this regime. Filipinos have been cursing the Marcos government in the past five months for the floods that have made their lives miserable. Now they’ll be cursing it for the high costs of hospitalization for their families and even deaths from diseases that Marcos was more than willing to have them endure.

Marcos and his family might just be awakened in the wee hours of the morning by their personal bodyguards or maid who’ll tell them the last of the Presidential Security Guard tanks have left Malacañang.

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Marcos’ hijacking of PhilHealth funds part of broad plunder conspiracy
Source: Breaking News PH