Senators on Tuesday, September 1, welcomed President Rodrigo Duterte’s order to remove the regional vice presidents of the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation.

“The reshuffle within the agency is consistent with our earlier call to carry out a proper cleansing process and guarantee a fund life for the state health insurer that would benefit generations of Filipinos,” Senator Grace Poe said in a statement.

As the order came with Duterte’s nomination of former National Bureau of Investigation director Dante Gierran as PhilHealth president and CEO, Poe said, “The change in leadership should not absolve those who will be found remiss in their obligations, which have brought the PhilHealth to its current ailing state.”

Relief from office should not spare corrupt or negligent officials from punishment, Poe added.

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“I laud the move of the President to remove all the regional vice presidents as a top-to-bottom revamp is needed to end the mafia that is controlling all the transactions within the state health insurance agency,” Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri said in a separate statement.

“They should continue as well the revamp to middle management and field managers who had shown collusion with the mafia by their non-action on cases filed against erring and fraudulent hospitals and clinics by PhilHealth’s anti-fraud division,” Zubiri added.

Zubiri noted a “clear pattern of protection for colluding institutions” that could be “easily traced” to PhilHealth officers who should be made to answer for irregularities.

Zubiri also welcomed Gierran’s nomination as PhilHealth chief. He said Gierran’s background in investigating crime should help him “untangle the mafia web inside PhilHealth.”

Senate President Vicente Sotto III and Senator Panfilo Lacson also earlier welcomed Gierran’s nomination.

Citing an August 2019 Senate blue ribbon panel investigation, Senator Richard Gordon earlier accused the so-called “Mindanao Group” of PhilHealth regional vice presidents of being members of a “mafia” that perpetrates fraud in the state health insurer.

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However, the officers Gordon tagged were hailed as “the good guys” and “crusaders against corruption” by whistleblowers in the August 2020 investigation by the Senate committee of the whole. In this more recent probe, the whistleblowers accused members of the PhilHealth executive committee of being part of the alleged mafia.

Lengthy hearings by the Senate and House of Representatives have uncovered several schemes and irregularities that have allegedly bled PhilHealth billions of pesos over the years. These could not have been done without the complicity of at least some PhilHealth executives, lawmakers said.

The Senate is set to release the committee report of its findings from the August 2020 probe into PhilHealth anomalies. It is expected to include recommendations for the prosecution of several PhilHealth officers.

At least 13 senators must sign their approval of the report for it to be adopted by the Senate. – Rappler.com