Brewing in the budget

Five days before Christmas Day, Filipinos are yet to feel the festive holiday mood as two interrelated events have sparked significant controversy and fired up people to be anxious and livid: the reallocation/misallocation of the budget and the zero government subsidy for the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth).

For the first time in recent history, Congress gave the biggest chunk of the budget to the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) with a whopping P1.113 trillion.

We all know the reason, of course. One social media post says it best: more DPWH budget, the more budget going to the pockets.

Flood control, the favorite infrastructure project of our lawmakers, constitutes almost 30 percent of the total budget of the DPWH in the last decade. From P42.2 billion in the 2015 General Appropriations Act (GAA), it skyrocketed to P244.5 billion in the 2024 GAA.

Meanwhile, the budget of the Department of Education (DepEd) was now slashed amounting to P737 billion, blatantly violating the Constitution, where the state shall assign the highest budgetary priority to education.

My alma mater, the University of the Philippines, received its largest budget cut in almost a decade with a total reduction of more than P2 billion.

PBBM, of course, can ask the bicameral conference committee (bicam) to reconvene. As of this writing, there has been no call yet on the possible reconvening.

Senate President Francis Escudero, who formerly headed the Sente finance committee, rejected calls asking PBBM to undo the bicam’s move. He further said there was no need for Marcos to exercise his veto powers. There are funds, according to Escudero, that Marcos Jr. may tap as the latter is authorized to augment DepEd’s budget by using the agency’s unspent funds from previous years.

Still on the subject of budget, amid public uproar, our lawmakers restored the Ayuda sa Kapos ang Kita Program (AKAP), targeting the “near poor” or those low-income and minimum-wage earners as beneficiaries. With a budget of P26 billion, or P80 million per congressman and P200 million per senator, AKAP is simply patronage politics.

House Speaker Martin Romualdez fiercely defended this PBBM Legacy Program – a new version of the pork barrel – by saying “ayuda is not charity, it is justice.”

If this is true, where is justice when the budget of 4Ps, which has proven to break intergenerational poverty, suffered a P50-billion budget cut? What will happen now to the goal of the Marcos Jr. economic managers to cut down poverty incidence into single digit by 2028? In short, another budol promise!

Another agency that suffered spending cut, through zero government subsidy, is PhilHealth. I feel strongly about the zero subsidy for health care in 2025, since I authored Republic Act No. 11223, otherwise known as the Universal Health Care (UHC) Act, in the 17th Congress.

Under UHC, all Filipinos are covered by PhilHealth, including those who cannot afford to pay the premiums, like the indigents and seniors, the so-called “indirect contributors,” since their contributions would come from sin taxes on alcohol, tobacco and sugary products.

Allowing zero government subsidy, therefore, would contradict the violate UHC and the Sin Tax Law.

A clueless and out-of-touch PBBM defended government’s zero subsidy to PhilHealth. Without these subsidies, Mr. President, the working class, or those who pay the monthly premiums, would shoulder the health care costs of the poor who do not have the funds to contribute.

When I was still in Congress (and even when I transferred to the Executive department), I batted for a National Health Service, patterned after the one in the United Kingdom, where I studied, to implement our own UHC.

Unfortunately, my proposed measure was stymied by the counterpart bill filed by then senator Ralph Recto, who ironically now heads the Department of Finance and took unused or excess funds from PhilHealth.

To recall, Republic Act 11223 stringently prohibits the transfer of any portion of its reserved fund or income to the national government, other agencies or instrumentalities like GOCCs (Section 11). In the Implementing Rules and Regulations on Program Reserve Funds, PhilHealth is mandated to set aside a portion of its accumulated revenues not needed to meet the cost of the current year’s expenditure as reserve funds (Section 11.1).

We must bear in mind that PhilHealth is not a fund-raising or a revenue-generating institution.

Under Section 11.3 of Republic Act 11223, it is clearly stipulated: “Whenever actual reserves exceed the required ceiling at the end of the fiscal year, the excess of the PhilHealth reserve fund shall be used to increase the Program’s benefits and to decrease the amount of members’ contributions.”

We shouldn’t be content with the prevailing benefits. Every Filipino, especially the impoverished, disadvantaged and marginalized, are banking on PhilHealth to expand the medical services and lower the premium contributions of members.

I have always maintained that PhilHealth should use its savings to increase the case rates for chronic ailments afflicting many Filipinos and expand the limited financial coverage for illnesses that are the leading causes of mortality among all ages, especially children and the elderly.

I am glad that PhilHealth, albeit late, listened to my pleas. I understand that just this week the PhilHealth Board increased case rates by 50 percent and expanded its benefit packages, which now include the top 10 mortality diseases in the Philippines.

Let us express our vehement disapproval of the latest cuts on funds that would help improve education and health care. We know too well that these funds would be used to obliterate the Dutertes and their allies. After all, attack dogs against those opposing the Marcos-Araneta-Romualdez triumvirate do not come cheap in an election season. They require billions of pesos for their ayudas and other deals.