Albay 2nd district Rep. Joey Salceda (MANILA BULLETIN)

“Kung sino pa ang walang pera, siya pa ang malaki ang kailangang bayaran (It’s a pity that those who don’t have money are the ones who need to pay a lot).”

House Committee on Ways and Means chairman and Albay 2nd district Rep. Joey Salceda aired this sentiment as he pushed for a separate senior citizens' insurance program under the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (Philhealth) to cover “catastrophic” health expenditures.

Salceda floated this proposal during the Committee on Health hearing on Wednesday, May 15, where he pushed for the passage of his House Bill (HB) No. 52, or the Philhealth Reform Act.

“Our proposed framework is to allow the Philhealth to create a catastrophic health insurance program for senior citizens on top of the government’s sponsorship of coverage for Senior Citizens,” he said.

The lawmaker said “catastrophic” health expenses refer to those that bite off significant portion of the patient’s household income.

Such expenditures include cancer treatments and conditions that require major hospitalization.

With this, Salceda urged the creation of a separate insurance program given how “seniors tend to pay a larger share of the hospital bill out-of-pocket”.

Citing data from the PhilHealth, he noted that only a third of seniors’ hospital bills from Level 3 private hospitals is provided with some level of insurance support and subsidy. This makes the elderly populace as the least supported sector per share of total hospital costs, he said.

“We have a duty to provide dignified old age and quality care for senior citizens. They didn’t get the best cards in life. So, they didn’t get to save enough for pension and elderly health care. But there are financial solutions to this fundamental problem of inequity,” he underscored.

In a 2018 report by the Longitudinal Study of Ageing and Health in the Philippines (LSAHP), 46 percent of seniors were found to be living below the poverty line.

Salceda, an economist by profession, noted that the median reported income for seniors was about P3,000 per month——resulting in around P9.1 trillion in welfare gap to give them a decent old age.

Around 18 percent or P1.67 trillion of this is the healthcare financing gap for quality care of senior citizens.

“I’m not saying we should cover the whole thing. But certainly there are ways to finance the gap,” he said.

The Bicolano congressman said his proposed insurance scheme can partly be funded by new sin taxes and by growth in revenues of the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR) and the Philippine Charity and Sweepstakes Office (PCSO).

Salceda noted that PhilHealth’s excess funds can also support this new program.