The government still owes COVID frontliners some P27 billion in unpaid allowances, prompting a congressman from Bicol to call on the Department of Health (DOH) to speed up release of the amount.
Camarines Sur Rep. Luis Raymund Villafuerte, at the same time, welcomed the reported release by the DBM of more than P91 billion COVID-19 allowances and other benefits due healthcare workers (HCWs) since 2021.
Villafuerte expressed optimism that the required paperwork could be prepared immediately by the DOH for the prompt release of still-unpaid allowances amounting to P27 billion.
“It’s nearly a year after the WHO (World Health Organization) declared the worldwide health emergency spawned by COVID-19 as officially over, and yet many of the HCWs who were at the frontlines of that three-year global war against the virus that originated from China have yet to receive the economic benefits due them for their untold sacrifices to save lives during the pandemic,” Villafuerte, a lead author of the law that provided Public Health Emergency Benefits and Allowances (PHEBA) to medical frontliners for their COVID-related services, said.
To correct this lapse and ensure that all HCWs finally receive their unpaid PHEBA soon and in full, Villafuerte backed a DBM proposal for the DOH to solve the delays in the releases by fast-tracking the creation of a nationwide mapping of all the law-provided allowances due these healthcare workers, broken down per region and per health facility.
Villafuerte likewise backed the proposal of Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman for the DOH to use a blanket memorandum of agreement with the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) and private organizations to speed up the release of the still-unpaid Health Emergency Allowance (HEA) claims of HCWs in private hospitals and local governments.
“Such a fast-tracked mapping and the use of a blanket MOA with the DILG and private organizations to address bottlenecks in the release of HEA claims mostly in hospitals and local governments—as both suggested by the DBM— would let the DOH come up with a definitive amount as to how much COVID-19 extra benefits exactly are still due our medical frontliners,” Villafuerte said.
“Moreover, this would enable the DBM to determine whether it needs to allocate additional funds other than the combined P91.283 billion in HEA and other allowances that it now claims to have already released to the DOH for payout to HCWs and non-HCWs all over the country,” Villafuerte said.