OVER 250,000 elderly Filipinos will receive P10,000 each this year as the initial beneficiaries of a 2024 law granting this financial gift to all senior citizens when they reach 80, 85, 90 or 95 years of age.
The Marcos administration has allotted P2.95 billion for the inaugural rollout this year of the cash windfall for octogenarians and nonagenarians under Republic Act 11982, or the Expanded Centenarians Act of 2024, said Camarines Sur Rep. Luis Raymund Villafuerte, one of the authors of the law.
Citing a report by the National Commission of Senior Citizens (NCSC), Villafuerte said that the government is set to hand out the financial reward this year to some 275,000 octogenarians and nonagenarians, regardless of their financial status.
These beneficiary-seniors include the 1,079 who received their cash gifts during the simultaneous inaugural distribution under RA 11982 at Malacañang and other places last Feb. 26, and some 7,000 more who will have received their bonuses by end-February, said Villafuerte, also an author of RA 11916, or an Act Increasing the Social Pension of Senior Citizens, which doubled this monthly stipend to P1,000.
“Such cash gifts of P10,000 for the elderly when they turn 80, 85, 90 or 95, are on top of the P100,000 bonus due every one of them when they becomes a centenarian or reach the age of 100, as provided for by RA 10868, or the ‘Centenarians Act of 2016,’” Villafuerte said.
The United Nations (UN) projects the population of Filipinos aged 60 and above to exceed 10 percent from 2025 to 2030.
According to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), the population of the Philippines was 109 million plus as of 2020, of whom 9.24 million were seniors.
About a tenth of these senior citizens—some 950,000–were octogenarians and nonagenarians.
Villafuerte was the lead author of House Bill 302, which was one of the bills consolidated into the final version of the measure—(HB 7535)—approved by the House of Representatives.
Earlier, Villafuerte called on the Department of Health (DOH) to look into yearend reports that certain drug stores or pharmacies had refused to grant discounts to senior citizens who do not have their purchase booklets with them when buying their medicines, in violation of a newly-issued DOH order requiring the elderly to present only their identification cards (IDs) and doctors’ prescriptions to avail of such law-mandated price cuts.
“The DOH and other appropriate government Offices need to check on the compliance of drugstores with DOH AO (Administrative Order) No. 2024-0017 and to crack down on erring establishments, as the reported refusal of certain pharmacies to sell prescription meds to elderly Filipinos is a blatant breach of RA 9994,” Villafuerte said.