These are terms in Tagalog — that mean being boorish or uncouth and being insulting or insolent, respectively — to describe the action of Congress with respect to the 2025 budget. Gross as they are, the Tagalog words offer the exact words that convey Congress’s disgraceful behavior.
In a statement being circulated through the petition platform called Change.org, citizens call the 2025 budget as the “most corrupt budget in Philippine history.”
The most egregious feature of the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA) that Congress approved is the budget of zero for the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PHIC) or PhilHealth. This is a blatant violation of the Universal Health Care Act (UHCA) and the Sin Tax Law.
To enable universal healthcare and social health insurance, the law obliges the government to allocate premiums for those who are financially incapable — the poor or indigents, senior citizens, and persons with disabilities as well as all their dependents. A zero budget strips the premiums of indirect contributors. Worse, the zero budget makes the direct contributors including the working class, kasambahays (household workers), overseas Filipino workers, and self-earning individuals bear the sole burden of financing PhilHealth. The unfairness or injustice is intensified when the government allocates nothing for PhilHealth but increases the premium contributions of the direct contributors. Funds are pooled within PhilHealth to enable risk sharing — by removing premiums for indirect contributors, government is blatantly abandoning its commitment to social solidarity in working towards universal healthcare.
Congress also violates the earmarking of excise tax revenues from tobacco and sweetened beverages to PhilHealth, as mandated by the Sin Tax Law.
Moreover, Congress flouts the Constitution’s provisions. The GAA cannot amend statutes like the UHCA and the Sin Tax Law. The bicameral conference committee cannot overreach and insert provisions that were not part of the bill approved by either the House of Representatives or the Senate.
And Congress has rejected the Constitution’s right to health. The right to health is concretely expressed in a commitment that retrogression does not happen in the provision of essential healthcare and that maximum available resources are used for the progressive realization of universal healthcare. Obviously, giving PhilHealth a budget of zero breaks such a principle.
The loud apologists for the corrupt 2025 GAA are the garrulous Senate President Chiz Escudero and the seemingly immaculate Senator Grace Poe, who employ the duplicitous argument that PhilHealth does not need a budget allocation, for it has P600 billion in reserve funds.
Senators Escudero and Poe and their colleagues in both chambers of Congress are contemptuous of the law. First, they reject the UHCA that mandates the government to provide the premiums for indirect contributors. Using the reserve funds to cover the premiums of indirect contributors is treachery, as the reserve funds actually constitute the previously paid premiums of members.
Second, they again violate the UHCA that unequivocally states that any excess in reserve funds must be used to increase PhilHealth benefits and decrease the premiums of direct contributors. The so-called excess funds must be used to fund the expansion of benefits (like the 30% increase in benefit packages, which adjusts for inflation over the years), the rollout of new benefits that PhilHealth promised in the face of legislative and public pressure, and the implementation of the much-delayed outpatient benefits (Konsulta program).
Worse, Senators Escudero and Poe dismiss the fact that PhilHealth’s insurance contract liabilities (ICL), per its latest financial statements, already exceed P1 trillion. It goes without saying that the ICL far outstrips PhilHealth’s reserve funds. It would behoove an insurance company, a social health insurance at that, to have the reserve funds adequately cover insurance contract liabilities. The PhilHealth budget of zero will exacerbate PhilHealth’s financial stress.
Thus the insensitivity, the callousness, and the deception displayed by Senators Escudero and Poe have incurred the anger of citizens. They have earned the disreputable monikers of “Heartless Chiz” and “Disgraced Grace”
But we should not forget that the pambababoy or the pambabastos was an act of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The House Speaker, Martin Romualdez, let “Heartless Chiz” and “Disgraced Grace” be the voice of the pambababoy.
Only Senators Risa Hontiveros and Koko Pimentel resolutely and courageously stood up and opposed this dastardly act.
PhilHealth’s zero budget, severe in itself, is inextricably linked to a larger problem that makes the GAA 2025 the “most corrupt.” While Congress has degraded PhilHealth by giving it a budget of zero, it has substantially increased the budget for the medical assistance for indigents — the type of ayuda that is prone to corruption and arbitrariness and serves patronage politics.
Although the act of giving a budget of zero for PhilHealth is the most brazen, Congress has also slashed the budget for basic education by P12 billion, state colleges and universities by P30 billion, science and technology by P20 billion, poverty alleviation and nutrition (the 4Ps or Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program), and active transportation.
The funds taken away from essential economic and social services have been transferred to the politically motivated ayuda like the medical assistance for indigents and the AKAP (Ayuda para sa Kapos ang Kita) for the “near poor,” for which a P26-billion budget was approved.
Further, some critics point out that the 2025 GAA violates Article XIV, Section 5(5) of the Constitution. Said Section provides that “The State shall assign the highest budget priority to education.” They observe that education has been replaced by public works, where the bulk of pork barrel funds are parked, as having the biggest allocation in the 2025 GAA. A total of P1.114 trillion has been allocated to public works. Critics have likewise exposed the trick where Congress includes programs or items under education like schools of national security agencies to give the pretense of a budget prioritizing education.
Mark our words: the 2025 GAA is a budget for the electioneering of the incumbents in the ruling political coalition. Ultimately, it is a budget for the preservation and extension of their power through Charter Change.
How then can we overturn the GAA that debases universal healthcare and other public goods, abets corruption, and serves patronage politics? Will the President heed the public call for a veto? Likely not; after all, his most loyal allies, led by his relative, the Speaker, are the ones responsible for the pambababoy.
Let’s listen to a global expert in universal healthcare, whom we cannot name, for we haven’t asked permission. Said she: “I did not believe it was possible to do this. I would be the last one to suggest a decrease in premium but — I think direct contributors should start insisting to decrease their premium or the government pays their share. Just for fairness. The technical approach is not working. Perhaps big voting constituencies like GSIS or SSS members with the employers’ confederations can muscle up.”
Another technocrat, the economist and former Finance Undersecretary Cielo Magno echoes the same sentiment that “the technical approach is not working.” In her social media video, which gained three million views, she championed the call for direct contributors not to pay premiums or for their payments to be refunded. Again, it is about fairness.
The experts and the technocrats feel the popular sentiment and the explosion of anger in the face of government’s heartlessness and harshness. “Remove #PhilHealth in our pay slips!!!” has become a call of citizens that has gone viral.
The transfer of PhilHealth funds to the National Government and the latest development of giving a zero budget to PhilHealth, together with the ineptness and inefficiency of its leadership, have damaged universal healthcare. Government has broken its commitment to social solidarity. The administration’s irresponsible, malicious, and flagrant actions have fired up the people. And the consequences are terrifying: the destruction of institutions like PhilHealth, the beginning of a fiscal crisis, and the inevitability of political turmoil.
Filomeno S. Sta. Ana III coordinates the Action for Economic Reforms.
Pia Rodrigo is strategic communications officer at Action for Economic Reforms.
www.aer.ph
